Think expansively about Portfolios
IdeaMason is lots of things, a library, a citation maker, an idea deposit, a composition builder, a categorizer, and a project organizer. It can be all those things to one person or only a few of those things. It really depends on the nature of your work.
All your work in IdeaMason is organized into portfolio. When you open IdeaMason for the first time, you find yourself working in your first portfolio “My Portfolio”. Think of a portfolio as a file or container of ideas, sources, links, notes. You can create as many portfolios as you like and name them whatever you like just like you would an ordinary file. Tip: Under File/Portfolio properties you can write a brief description to help you outline or describe the work you intend to do in the portfolio.
Use a single portfolio for a large project
If you are starting work on a big project you could create a single portfolio that will contain all the work, ideas, sources and compositions. You can divide your work into a number of different activities within this portfolio. You can also organize your materials and sources within the portfolio into different categories. The work you do in this portfolio might result in the creation of one major composition. Or you might choose to divide your work, chapter by chapter, creating a new composition per chapter. Inevitably, a large project always seems to break off into smaller subsets projects and even subset papers. This is where the advantages of IdeaMason come into play. If all your ideas and sources are in one portfolio, it will be easy to reuse ideas and/or sources, or even expand on a single idea or category of ideas creating a whole new project.
Create a home library
The work in a portfolio doesn’t always have to consist of ideas, sources and the compositions created with these materials. You might want to use a single portfolio focusing on only one of the features. For instance, if you have a home library or read a lot you could use a single portfolio as a library. This portfolio will grow with you over time keeping record of all the books in your home library and all the books you have read over the years. Storing sources (books, magazines or even online references) in IdeaMason lets you categorize, sort and search sources with ease. You can also make use of the different materials types (quotation, idea, summary, or abstract) and link these items with the source. You could even combine this with online research, linking relevant websites, or external files directly with a source.
Are you a writer?
Whether you simply like to dabble in ideas or you are a more serious writer you might not always have as much interest in the source management aspect of IdeaMason. Don’t worry, just ignore it and concentrate on the idea capture, storage and organizing tools.
The thing to remember is that you can create as many different portfolios as you like, for any reason you like. Each portfolio file ends in an .imd extension and is saved independently just like a regular file. This makes them easy to backup or take a file with you as you move between home and work or on the road. Remember, you have to have a copy of IdeaMason on a computer to be able to open a portfolio.
Build on your ideas!
One important aspect of IdeaMason is that even though each portfolio is a separate file - the ideas and sources you store in each portfolio are considered independent items and can be individually copied to other portfolios. For instance, if you have designated one of your portfolios as your home library organizer, you can easily copy a source or set of sources to a new portfolio as the source foundation for a new project. *See “Managing a Portfolio” under the Help file - “copy items between portfolios” for more information.