Suggestions for New NB Users

If you are new to Nota Bene, the following are some suggestions for the best way to get started.

Quick Overview: For general information about Nota Bene, its features and benefits, see the following:

•Welcome.nb is the file that opened when you first installed Nota Bene. It can be opened by clicking Help, Sample Instructional Files.

•For a general description of the NB word processor, Orbis, Ibidem and IbidPlus, see Nota Bene Overview.

•For a longer description of Orbis, Nota Bene's multi-file search engine, see Orbis Overview.

•For a longer description of Ibidem, Nota Bene's bibliographic management program, see Ibidem Overview.

•Professor Mark Szuchman has prepared a series of short videos that demonstrate the use of Nota Bene. See NB Videos.

Basic NB skills: The following reading materials and exercises will give you a good foundation for using Nota Bene.

•For an overview of formatting in Nota Bene, see Formatting Overview.

•Even if you never use Nota Bene's action line, a general understanding of how commands are used in Nota Bene and how they can be seen and edited in Show Codes View is helpful. See NB Commands and Editing in Show Codes View.

Using More and More of the Program: Most NB users do not use all of the functionality that is available. But when and if the following seem useful to you, you can investigate further, starting with the links below:

•Use Ibidem to maintain a bibliographic database, and to generate properly formatted citations and bibliographies. See the Ibidem videos and the Ibidem PDF Tutorial (click Help, Ibidem, Ibidem Tutorial) and the Ibidem sample file (click Help, Sample Instructional Files).

•Use Orbis to search through your notes and papers and find the information you want as you are writing. See Orbis Overview.

•Format your papers using templates for academic style manuals (Chicago, Turabian, MLA, APA). See Academic Styles.

•Create your own templates for letterhead, a fax cover sheet, or a form letter or format that you use repeatedly. See Templates.

•Work with book length manuscripts, moving easily from chapter-files to a single file that contains the full manuscript and back again. See Manuscript Files.

•Generate a Table of Contents or use NB's powerful tools for creating an Index. See Index and Table of Contents.

•Work with an outline or a structured framework of headings and text. See Frameworks and Outlines.

•Work with a numbered list and let NB take care of keeping the numbers in the correct order. See Numbered Lists.

•Use cross references and let Nota Bene keep track of the page number (or footnote number, chapter number, section number etc.). For example, if you say "see discussion on factory farmed pigs on page 36," Nota Bene can automatically change the page number if the text you are referring to is moved to a different page. See Cross References.

•Insert graphic images and files from other programs in a Nota Bene file. See Objects (OLE) and Frames.

•Include dynamic links to web pages or to other files in your Nota Bene file. See Links.

•Do a little adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing on the side, without opening your spreadsheet program. See Mathematical Functions.

•Use up to three independent series of footnotes and/or endnotes in the same paper. See Footnotes and Endnotes.

•Change all your footnotes to endnotes. See Endnotes.

•Use tables or columns that wrap from the bottom of the page to the top of the next column. See Tables and Columns.

•Work in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic or Cyrillic (available if you have the Lingua module). See Lingua.

This is only a partial list of the many features that are designed to make your writing and research easier. Browse through the menus and through this Help material for many more ways to make your work more efficient.