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Mindmanager is a very useful tool for brainstorming, blamestorming, knocking together documents, project plans, to do lists, and pretty much anything you need to throw together quickly.

It allows you to throw ideas together, move them around, assign markers and relationships and generally allows you to offload the actual thoughts and information instead of spending time thinking about how many rows you need in a table or in what order it needs to be in.

I've written documents in Word / Open Office Writer / Excel / Project / HTML for years .. and wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of thoughts. If I ever decided, or had to, write a book again this is the tool I would use to start with.

Note that I use mind manager at work every day for just about everything :) There is a free version as well called Freemind.

Agree fully 100%. The take of the good feedback here is to focus on the creation on the content and leave the formatting to the publisher.

Now, while nobody have mentioned it here, there are tools to help you to develop your ideas and create that structured content. As some people said, linear writing, focusing on all the details from the first pass is not the way to go. You should develop your ideas as they come (top-down and down-to-top, as they emerge). If you know the main structure that you are going to have, your write top-down. If you have a lot of ideas, you capture them and then organize them in groups until you have a logical structure and order.

In addition, depending on the size of your document, a work processor only shows a very small portion of your document - about 0.25% of the document for a 200 pages document. You have to do a lot of scroll-up/down. Its almost like I like watching a paint thru a pinhole.

Mindmapping tools solve both problems. They let you capture your ideas and structuring (and restructuring) as you write using drag and drop. Can also see the whole document in a single screen or expland the sections (or the text) to see the details. While oriented to the educational market, Inspiration has the best tutorial to explain the concept here: http://www.inspiration.com/videos/Inspiration . It explain how to develope your concept (and content) and then export to MS Word using Styles instead of formatting (as other advise here). Inspiration is very good, but not the most polished and capable application in the bunch.

The most polished mindmapping application that I have seen so far is Mindjet's MindManager ( http://www.mindjet.com/ ). I saw the demo on version 8 and it is impressive (worth the money). I have also used version 7 for a few months for developing ideas and writing procedures. The exports to MS Word look even better than the ones from Inspiration. And you can even add due dates to the content sections (for your own control) and add attribued like completion percentage. You can also embeed graphics, Excel tables, attachments, links, etc. It also has and outline view, so that you can sort the order of topics, etc.

The free alternative is FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ). The lastest version have many extensions for exporting in different formats too. I develop my personal mindmaps in FreeMind and keep a portable version of FreeMind (with Java) in my pen drive. FreeMind exports to OpenOffice format, but you could use OpenOffice for converting into MS Word, if required.

So the steps are:
1. Forget the document formatting applications mentioned by 99% of the commenters here.
2. Use a mindmap application to create your content.
3. Export to MS Word.
4. Send to you publisher and let them take care of the rest.

Easy, isn't it?

If you gather a relatively manageable group of people (up to 10) in a room with a projector, and you work through the meeting with a clear agenda and take visual notes using Mind Mapping software (http://www.mindjet.com/), I've personally experienced a tremendous gain in productivity, as people tend to collaborate better when they have a visual representation.

I took a while figuring out the whole Wiki thing, too...They are a difficult concept.
Installing TikiWiki and poking it with a stick was educational for me...you may find it to be as well. This bit of software will help tremendously as well.

Basically, the easiest way I've found to think of a Wiki is as a collaborative mind map, if such a thing is possible. I believe they are an attempt to store information in an even more context-specific way than the conventional Web, and in a manner which as closely as possible resembles that of an actual brain.

The other thing about Wikis is that they're lightning fast to write. Although HTML/XHTML aren't what you'd call rocket science, they're still sufficiently complex that it can be a pain to have to write out all the tags. With a Wiki, (http://www.yahoo.com|Yahoo!) will put a basic link in a page, but without an alt tag of course.

The main audience I've seen using them myself are FPS game mod programmers, although I know a lot of other people of course do as well. But the reason why they're a boon to the UT or Quake mod crowd in particular is because it basically allows them to write pages in two parts.

a) Textbook definition of class XYZ, what it does etc. (The theory)

b) Another section lower down where people can put war stories about experiences they've had actually coding with said class, examples of how to do it, or corrections/clarifications of elements of the definition. (The practice)

In this example, it's actually fairly similar to what php.net has for its documentation, except a wiki is probably a bit more specifically designed for that from the ground up.
Hope this helps...

FreeMind is just a freeware version of either MindJet or some other software for doing Mind Mapping. If it's like other MM software, it's a brainstorming tool -- which means it's deliberately messy. Not good for doing presentations.

Having said that, this software lends itself to habitual plogging in the workspace, and the html output is some of the best auto-generated stuff I've seen.

With the right backup/recovery tools, W2K+ is a highly productive desktop.

Spacemonger - great application of that tile-graphing technique (whose name escapes me). PowerDesk has a size manager that uses horizontal bars.

Unison - been looking for this for years. Thanks!

Visio is so impressive, especially the manufacturer-specific symbols. WhiteHorse is vapor, but wow. MindManager is also good.

If you like Palm Desktop, you should try Ecco Pro. It has native Palm support, live sync between multiple PCs, double click to launch URLs and a powerful data model. Support stopped 7 years ago, but it works great except for a hard limit of 32K items in a single file (which takes years to hit, then you need to archive older calendar entries into a separate file).

Have a look at Mind Manager by Mindjet.

I use it regularly and I'm still finding new uses for it. It's *very* easy to use yet powerful.

You can reorganize the information as the lecture is proceeding.

You can clean up your notes right after you take them when you have free time so that they are genuinely useful

You can cut/copy/paste/link multiple sets together to create a global overview

You can export to powerpoint or outlines to enhance studying instead of having to create "flash cards" or "outlines" from scratch
Try it I think you might find youself sold