Restructuring your model

When you have captured a number of ideas, you may find you want to group them together under new headings. BrainStorm gives you four ways of doing this: cut and paste, drag and drop, throw and retrieve and Nudge.

Cut stores entries in the sequence they were selected and then pastes them in this new sequence. Select consecutive entries by clicking one and then holding the Shift key down while clicking the last of the group. Alternatively, hold the [Ctrl] key down while clicking on non-consecutive entries. When selected, press [Ctrl+X] to cut them. Select a destination and press [Ctrl+V] to paste them in the sequence they were selected.

Select all the entries in a list by pressing Ctrl+A.

You can use the toolbar icons for Cut and Paste .

(A quick, and impressive, way to re-order an entire list is to [Ctrl]+click to select entries in the preferred sequence, then press [Ctrl+X] quickly followed by [Ctrl+V].)

Like this:

The Sort entries commands and will sort either a selected group of entries, or the entire list, into either ascending or descending alphanumeric sequence (0-9;A-Z or Z-A; 9-0).

Drag and drop means that you can select one or more entries and, while holding the left mouse button down, slide them to a new location. Move the mouse pointer to an entry for the moved items to be pasted above it. Drag and Drop works between BrainStorm windows even if they open on to different models.

By holding down the Shift key while dragging and dropping a contiguous group of entries, you can make the dragged entries 'descendants' of the target entry. Indeed, you can drag them to a heading to incorporate them into the list to which the heading belongs. We call the first 'Push down' and the second 'Push up'.

BrainStorm also gives you two special tools for restructuring your model quickly. They are Throw entry(ies) [Ctrl+T] or , and Retrieve entry [Ctrl+R] or . Use them with the Mark ([Ctrl+M] or click in the space between the entry and its icon). Throw moves the currently selected entry(ies) to just above the currently marked entry and Retrieve moves the currently marked entry to just above the current entry. Just keep the keys pressed down to move a succession of entries rapidly. The Mark moves to the next entry until the list is exhausted. Use Jump [Ctrl+J] or to dive back and forth to check progress or, indeed, to correct an overrun.

Nudge allows you to move entries up and down the current list one entry at a time. Use Alt+Up arrow and Alt+down arrow for this.

Keyboard and mouse shortcuts shows all the keyboard and mouse shortcuts.