Word Processing Functions in Notes & Journal?

Is there a plan for future versions of notes and journal to have some simple word processing functions like bolding, indentation, and bulleted lists? This would make it much easier for me to use it for writing talks.

We hope so!

In the meantime, there are some things you can do to work around the issue....

The current version of Study Notebook does not allow one to highlight any sort of special formatting, including special fonts, some italics, long quotations, or bullets. Here is one way to work around the bug:

1. Highlight the bullets.
2. Hit CTRL and C at the same time.
3. Highlight the sentence *before* the bullets and when the little box comes up....
4. Click on the 'Note' part.
5. Then, hit CTRL and V. The bullets that you felt were important will be saved in your journal, even if they are not highlighted on your page.

Notes also does not work with every page on LDs.org - only scriptures, manuals and magazine articles. You can use a similar procedure to save important information on these other types of pages:


1. Highlight the information.
2. Hit CTRL and C at the same time.
3. Create a new journal entry.
4. Click on the note part.
5. Then, hit CTRL and V. The information that you wanted to highlight will be saved in your journal, even if it is not highlighted on your page.

Make sure that as you do so, you add the items to the appropriate Notebook. Then, when you are ready to write your talk, you can click on the little arrow next to the Notebook, choose Download from the drop down menu, and then choose .DOCX or .RTF to save it as a word processing document that you can turn into your talk.

paynecd wrote:Is there a plan for future versions of notes and journal to have some simple word processing functions like bolding, indentation, and bulleted lists? This would make it much easier for me to use it for writing talks.

The church rarely gives us advance notice of any improvement plans. The feature used to be called "Notes and Journal" and was later renamed to "Notes", which, to me, de-emphasized the ability to much more with it.

This is still pretty much a "1.0" tool. This tool is somewhat related to the study toolbar you find when reading the scriptures and other things in English. At the moment, the study toolbar is only available in English.

I haven't messed with Notes in other languages until just now. I tried it out and see that although it is available in some other languages (I tried Spanish and German), it has some problems. Maybe I'll make a separate post about that at some point in the future if I find time.

My guess is the church might focus on making that tool more functional in additional languages before improving the Notes tool; although broader language support might be included with overall enhancements to the tool, which are needed.

I doubt any church developers have looked at this tool in a while.

From what I was told in my role as CSM with the LDS Response Team, the original intent was that the bugs would be worked out in the English version before it was made available in other languages. There was a project a short while ago to determine where the Study Tools worked and where they didn't, but I have not heard anything further regarding that.

Part of the issue is that it was originally conceived as a very basic text processor for making study notes, but members began using it for so much more than that. So...do they keep the original intent only, or expand it to be something other than what was intended? I don't know the answer. I just answer the questions.

PamelaBonta wrote:Part of the issue is that it was originally conceived as a very basic text processor for making study notes, but members began using it for so much more than that. So...do they keep the original intent only, or expand it to be something other than what was intended? I don't know the answer. I just answer the questions.

I don't know the answers, either. What I do understand is that this tool (along with enabling online content to be annotated) has immense potential to facilitate spiritual blessings to the individual through the use of technology. Many of the other tools help you serve in your callings. This one can help bring individuals closer to God (the user interface for reviewing tags and notes hinders that a bit at the moment). I hope the people making decisions will be blessed with the appropriate spiritual perspective here.

All we can do is submit feedback through LDS.org with suggestions for improvements and hope that those suggestions are considered by the developers.