The Corkboard window acts much like a piece of Cork which might be attached to your wall. As you can see from the picture above, it contains cards which can be added, deleted, edited, moved and resized to help view and organize your ideas.
Why use this Card Approach?
In the development of an idea, a creative person usually has thoughts flowing out in a million directions at once. By using separate cards to catalog each piece of information, the user's thoughts can be organized easily by moving these cards around and grouping them in two dimensional space. This concept is, in a way, different from the approach used by traditional outlining programs, which use a one dimensional, top-to-bottom approach to organizing ideas.
What is A Card, Anyway?
Basically, a card is a container for a piece of information. There are four different types of cards that can be used within Three By Five: Text cards, Label Cards, Picture Cards and QuickTime‚Ñ¢ Movie cards. To develop your ideas, you will be adding cards to your Corkboard window and moving them around to give them some organization. Although it will not be explained in detail in this demo manual, remember that cards can be placed into categories and then organized, viewed or searched by category. This enables you to zero in on specific information and specific cards very quickly.
Fonts/Sizes/Colors
As the picture above clearly shows (if you have a color monitor), you have full flexibility to assign fonts, styles, alignments and colors to any and all parts of each card. To make changes, select the card or cards that you wish to alter (by clicking on them) and use the Card menu to select the new characteristics:
 
Card Viewing Methods: Grid View and Free Form View
There are two different ways that you can view your cards in a Corkboard window. The first method is called Free Form view, and it allows cards to be placed randomly around the screen. The second one is called Grid View, and in this viewing mode, the cards are arranged in the window in a spreadsheet-like manner, with discrete rows and columns. Cards can be moved around and repositioned in Grid View without becoming a confusing mess. In Grid View, one card cannot be on top of another card because each spot, or cell, contains exactly one card. If another card is moved into a position that already contains a card, the card is moved out of the way to make room for the one being moved.
Each type of viewing mode has its advantages, depending on how you are using Three By Five. For simple, linear concepts, such as developing scenes for a script or for initially jotting down your ideas, Grid View is great for keeping all of the your cards in a neat, orderly spreadsheet-like format. However, when your ideas grow complex, with the need for topic-subtopic relationships between cards, Free Form is the only alternative. Free Form contains some very advanced features for arranging complex ideas visually into multi-level, fleshed out concepts. Some of these features include creating hierarchical "trees", collapsing and expanding subtopics and individually resizing cards.
The following picture shows a Corkboard window in Grid mode. Note that all of the cards are the same size and they are arranged in nice, discrete rows and columns:
 
The following picture shows a Corkboard window in Free Form mode:
 
Note the connecting lines that provide a tree-like feel to the cards in the Corkboard window. This indicates the relationship between the cards. This tree starts with the Presentation Notes label, and branches out to several subtopics, which in turn are subdivided yet again into more detail in the cards below them. This visual arrangement provides a great deal of information about the relationship between different cards and also allows you to arrange your cards into complex hierarchies directly within the Corkboard window.
