About brainstorming
lists ideas gather
Sometimes your project may start from virtually nothing. You want
to invite suggestions for what a document should contain. You are
asking your
colleagues to
brainstorm.
For example, you might be
- compiling an agenda and want to invite people to
offer agenda items.
- writing a course syllabus and want to invite possible topics
for inclusion.
- or making a shopping list for project materials (or just
who wants what for lunch!)
To do this, people could simply add
comments to a more-or-less blank page in the
usual way. Using a brainstorming document makes dealing with
this kind of approach easier, both to see the evolving document and to
collect the comments at the end so you can paste them into the next,
more finished version.
You can do anything with a brainstorming document that you can do
with any other kind of document. For example, you can set deadlines
for comment contributions in the usual way. If you or
the document, you'll get the background document that you originally
provided just as you would any other.
Background text
A brainstorming document doesn't have to be blank. Indeed, if you
only tick the box, you'll get a line of text at the top
inviting comments. You can add some introductory text to the page.
Making contributions
People make comments by
clicking on the
page in the usual way. However, for brainstorming documents the
text of the comments is shown alongside the marker superimposed on the
page itself. You are in effect adding bullet points to the page.
You may run out of space on the page or pages initially provided by
the background. Therefore, unlike ordinary documents, you
can . (The button is at the
very bottom of the last page).
If you want to make room to insert a comment or stop comments
overlapping (for example, if additions have been made to them or two
people made a comment in the same place simultaneously) you can move
the comments arround by clicking the red proof mark icon and dragging
it to a more convenient location. That can be on a different
page. (You can do this on any document, but it is particularly
relevant for brainstorming).
Getting the text out again
When building up a document in this way, the natural next step is
to take all the comments and incorporate them in a new version, either
a finished product or a new version or new document for which you
would then invite further comments.
To facilitate this, there are several ways in which brainstorming
documents behave slightly differently from others:
- When you , the text of
the comments is placed in the "plain text" or "formatted text" tab
along with any original text . You can, of course, copy and paste that text
elsewhere if you want. However, if you simply click OK, the effect
is to use the original plain text if any plus the comments as the
source text for the new version. This, in effect, fixes the comments
into the main text of the document for the next version.
- When you view
(on the menu)
brainstorming documents, the content will include the text of the comments just
as for superseding, ready to copy and paste elsewhere.
- Because comments are displayed on top of the page(s), you can
simply select and copy the text from the main window as you would
any other text. This does not include any text in the
background.
- If you need the authors, dates and/or status of the comments as
well as the text, you can make a
(on the menu)
in the same way as any other
document and copy and paste from that.