Month: May 2008

Long-standing BrainStorm user, Jack Rickards was struggling with trying to list the entries in BrainStorm that contained the same text. He could "find" and "find again" but that wasn’t enough.

Here’s the email exchange that led to a solution that worked for him.

From Jack:

This may be a WIBNI request or something I have stupidly overlooked that is already possible in the all-encompassing BrainStorm.

I realize that one can do a "find" and continue doing "find agains" on a text string and, with a split screen, copy the result of these multiple finds into a new list. Is there a way to ask BrainStorm to generate a list of all occurrences of a text string?

I have, in a BrainStorm model, projects all over the place under various major headings. I have included in these project titles, a priority code and a now/later code, for example [A1/now]. Obviously I am looking for a quick and dirty way to generate all my "A1/now"s in a separate list.

From me:

On the "all strings" – I usually "Write" "Only entries containing this text" to the clipboard then paste. The pasted lines form namesakes with the originals (of course). You may want to write just one level.

Or not.

Let us know if this helps.

From Jack:

Thanks David. That works great. What an incredible and powerful feature for setting & retrieving tagged info’ throughout a BrainStorm model. David I suspect this is just one of many great features that are fully implemented yet not being pitched!

Phew! Glad that solved your problem, Jack.

Thinkerlog disappeared from view for reasons we’re yet to ascertain. We now suspect a dodgy blog post or, perhaps, a sudden ban on the word ‘weblog’ as a sub-directory name. Whatever the cause, we’ve shut down the original while we sort things out.

This means that all links to the old blog will go nowhere, so we’re bringing them here.

It means that the three or four years of blog posts are in limbo, but we’ll try and figure out how to restore them.

We’ll keep you posted.