Hi James.<br><br>If you do not grok text its unlikely you will appreciate a text editor.<br>emacs is not just a text editor its an exceptionally powerful text editor -- a power which is likely to alienate you even more.<br>

So the best suggestion to someone who wishes to get into orgmode but finds text (and text editors) unpleasant is to give up on orgmode, just dig into emacs&#39; simpler uses for a while and when a little more comfortable (with emacs) try org again. Hopefully then your questions will be more focused to this list and the answers will be more useful to you.<br>
<br>That said, there is some merit in (some of) what you say.<br>org is so many different things at the same time that for a noob to find one&#39;s way through the documentation to make his usecase work with minimum pain seems to be unnecessarily hard.<br>


<br><br>The beginner&#39;s customization guide:<br><a href="http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html" target="_blank">http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html</a><br>is of course a starting point.<br>


<br>But I wonder if it would be possible to structure it into something like this outline so that different beginners could start at different places?<br><br>* Brainstorming-n-outlining<br>  TAB and the basic structure navigation and editing features<br>


* Exporting and Publishing<br>*** html export<br>*** Odt export<br>*** Web publishing<br>*** Latex publishing<br>*** Presentations<br>***** Lightweight options<br>  <a href="http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html" target="_blank">http://orgmode.org/worg/org-configs/org-customization-guide.html</a><br>


***** Beamer<br>* Babel<br>*** For programming<br>*** For teaching programming<br>*** For doing science (R)<br>*** For scientific publishing (R+Latex)<br>* Time/project mgmt (GTD)<br>
*** Agenda<br>
*** Time tracking<br>*** capture-archive<br>
*** Journalling<br>
*** org-habit<br>* Tables and spreadsheets<br>
* Integration with other emacs uses<br>*** gnus<br>*** bbdb/ org-contacts<br>*** firefox (org-protocol)<br>*** graphics (R, ditaa...)<br><br>