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In this Walkthrough we show the basics of the Notes feature:
a chat-style discussion between team members. You will see how to insert a
note, how to edit it, how to assign a note to a person for their attention,
and how to respond to another person's note.
To insert a new note, (1) select the text that the note will
be about. This will serve as the title of the note (which you can edit later).
Then (2) click on the Insert button up in the toolbar.
At this point two things take place. First,
OurWord
creates the new note, placing an icon at the end of the sentence.
This icon is the means by which people know that there
is a note which they might want to review, and by clicking on it
they can view and edit the note.
The second thing OurWord
does is to open a window so that you can edit the note contents. At the
top of the window is the text you originally selected, and in the scrollable
window below is the place where you can type the contents of the note. The system
inserts your name and the date automatically, which will come in handy when
multiple users begin to carry on a conversation about the topic.
This next picture shows an example of such a conversation.
We expect that teams will want to discuss such things as key terms, exegetical
questions, ideas for better wordings, and comments about awkward phrasings.
Participants in these conversations will include not only the translators, but
also the advisors and consultants. When finished, these notes will provide a
means of archiving the reasoning behind why changes were made; that is, the
discussion will serve to document how the text progressed from initial draft
into its final state.
On the note window's toolbar you will notice a dropdown
labeled 'Consultant.' This dropdown allows you to assign a note to a specific
person. When the note is first created, it is assigned to 'Anyone', meaning
that by default any person on the team should feel free to respond. But
frequently the author of the note will want to direct the note to a specific
team member. For example, an exegetical question might be directed to the
Advisor. You can click on that dropdown where you will see a list of your team
members, and you can assign the note to one of them.
You can also assign a note to 'Closed.' By doing this you
are declaring that no further discussion is anticipated for the note; yet you
still want to keep it around for future reference. (You can always reopen a
Closed note simply by assigning it to Anyone or to a team member.)
In the underlying window, notes appear as small icons. The
icons for closed notes are a gray color, while those that are active are a
brighter color. The drawing to the left shows the possibilities currently
available in OurWord, and the colors of their
icons. As you will see later, not all of these will be turned on for every
user; and we would hope that given time users will come to associate colors
with those notes for which they should pay attention.
To see the contents of a note, move the mouse over the icon.
There you can either hover for a half second, or you can click. This will
launch the notes window. To close the notes window, click on the 'x' in the
upper-right corner.
When you launch the notes window, it will always add a
response to the bottom of the window with your name and the date; and the
flashing "Type Here" prompt. If you merely want to read the note, just ignore
that prompt; you do not need to type anything there. (The empty response will
not be stored in the disk file.)
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