Brief Tour

TEE TEXT AREA

The Text Area is where ThinkTank displays the outline you’re working on, or as much of it as fits on the screen. The entries you see are headlines and they are arranged in outline form, with some indented under others. These headlines may represent the “surface” of a larger outline, with more information hidden “beneath” them, at lower levels of the outline. You can tell whether a headline contains additional information by its leader or leading character. A “+“ leader means that there is more material beneath the headline, a "-" leader means there is none.

One line in the Text Area, PRODUCT PLAN, is highlighted. The highlight is called the bar cursor, and the highlighted headline is called the bar cursor headline. A cursor is a pointer; you can move the bar cursor around your outline to point to different headlines. Notice the message ARROW KEYS MOVE BAR CURSOR near the bottom of the screen. Experiment

with the up and down (or left and right) arrow keys to see how to move the bar cursor from one headline to another. When

you’ve finished experimenting, move the bar cursor to PRODUCT CONCEPT, just below PRODUCT PLAN.

Moving the bar cursor is important because of a key Think— Tank operating principle:

THE POSITION OF THE BAR CURSOR DETERMINES

WHERE YOUR COHMANDS WILL TAKE EFFECT.

Get in the habit of moving it before selecting commands.

EXPANDING A HEADLINE

You can see the information under a headline by expanding it. If you press “<“ (or, without shifting, “,“), ThinkTank displays the next lower level of the outline under the headline you expanded, as shown in Figure 3—2. You can see a new paragraph and four new headlines under PRODUCT CONCEPT.

A paragraph is simply a block of text under a headline. It need not literally be a paragraph; it may consist of

several phrases, sentences, or paragraphs up to a maximum of 2048 characters.

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