Hello to all.
 
I am new to this forum.  This is my first post.  I have been an ECCO Pro user for many, many years and find it indispensible for organizing my projects, both on the job and with my hobbies.  Because ECCO has not been developed for quite a long time, I have sought alternative outliners, but have found nothing even close to the capabilities of ECCO.  So I remain somewhat frustrated with some of the limitations of ECCO that reflect its origins as a DOS program.  I have gravitated to this forum in hopes of finding solutions, but am not easily finding information on my particular issues.  I hope someone can point me to the appropriate threads.  Here are my main concerns:
 
(1) The inability to scroll through an outline via mouse wheel.  I have been able to find an external program that enables the mouse wheel in ECCO, although I  have not yet tried it.  I also read in this forum somewhere that there are other options for accomplishing this.  Can someone steer me to the best options (those that will most likely work, without bad side effects)?
 
(2) By far my biggest issue is formatting outlines for presentation to other people.  It certainly would be nice to be able to set different font sizes for different outline levels, and to automatically insert spaces between certain adjacent levels.  For years, I have been doing these sorts of formatting tasks by hand, one line at a time.  What a time waster.  I quite often present outlines to management, and they love them.  So a means of automating the formatting process for printing would be a real blessing.  Do any of the various tools developed for ECCO provide such capability?  Where can I read about them?  Any advice on relative merits of different approaches?
 
Thanks, in advance, for any guidance you can offer.

Thank you very much for your kind and thorough reply.  It certainly is nice to speak with someone else who recognizes the value of this great program and has taken steps to help it work even better.
 
I feel a bit chagrined that I had forgotten all about the ability to format the fonts in each individual outline level -- built right into the standard ECCO.  Like a dunce, I've been doing a lot of that "by hand," even though I now recall using the automatic formatting back years ago.  I surely am glad you refreshed my memory on that.  How embarrassing.
 
So that mainly leaves me with the issue of inserting blanks spaces between outline sections, to make sections stand out better and provide more "white space" for presentation purposes.  Outlines look so much better that way.  Right now, I add these spaces manually, by hitting a [Shift][Enter] at the end of each section.  That's not too big a deal in many cases.  It does get klunky, though, when you later add something new to the end of that section.  Now you have to delete the extra space you inserted earlier, and put one at the new end of the section.  Again, not a huge deal, but tedious when you have, say, 35 or 40 sections in an outline.  It would be great if the {Format}{Outline Styles}{Define Outline Style for Selected Levels} dialog contained - in addition to the font formatting - the option of inserting space(s) before and/or after the "Selected Levels".  This would be the equivalent of the {Format}{Format Paragraph} menu option in Microsoft Word.  With that, I believe all my needs would be met.  Perhaps someone a lot smarter than I can figure out how to make a tool for that.
 
I will follow your suggestions for getting the mouse-wheel scrolling to work.  That will certainly speed things up for me.  I use ECCO multiple times almost every day.  It will certainly be much more convenient to have mouse scrolling working.
 
Having this discussion with you has been rather enlightening.  More than ever, I now realize that ECCO - despite not being developed for quite a few years now - does my most-important knowledge-organization tasks for me far better than any other tool I have tried, and does 98% of what I wish it could do.  Most of my other favorite software (say, for editing digital music, or whatever) might do 60% of what I wish for, if I'm lucky.  ECCO is truly amazing.  A PIM/Spreadsheet/Outliner/Database, all in one, and easy to use.  I complained a bit about text formatting, and re-discovered that most of that is already in there, too.  Maybe we'll figure out how to get the "Format Paragraph" thing in there someday.
 
I've been checking out SQLNotes (now InfoQube) through its early releases, and it got my hopes up early on that there might be a "modern ECCO" on the horizon.  The latest release won't install under Windows 2000 (at least not yet), so I've lost contact with it.  Perhaps with help from your forum, I won't feel so bad about that.  
 
Once again, I very much appreciate your help.  I'll check back in when I have more questions, or if I recall any personal "tricks" I might post concerning ways to use ECCO.
 

Thanks very much for all the additional insights.  My hopes have been raised considerably that I'll be able to keep on using ECCO, and do so with a bit less effort thanks to the great tools people are developing.  I wish I were knowledgeable enough to help develop them.  
 
You talked about a "wish list."  After learning solutions to most of my needs with the help of this forum, I would summarize my remaining "wishes" this way:
 
(a) Under Format, Outline Styles, we can define a font for a selected outline level.  If this dialog box included the additional option of inserting a space before this outline level, it would be wonderful.  Even better, if we could set a different "font" size for that blank space.  This would allow us to automatically put a desired-size space between major outline sections, making the outline much more presentable to an audience.  
 
(b) It would also be helpful if setting a certain font for an item level did not also automatically set the same font for the data in the columns.  Oftentimes, styling an item level to be big and bold makes the data in the columns too big, and they overflow the column widths.  
 
So, as you can see, my needs mainly have to do with making my outlines more presentable to an audience.    
 
Thanks, again, for all the help and guidance.  I will be checking out the various extensions that have been suggested, to see what I have been missing.

Wow!  That is very helpful.  I had tried right clicking, hoping to find a "Format" option, with no luck.  Now I've taken a closer look, and find that the "Character" option brings up the formatting options.  Guess I should have tried them all way back when.  So [Control]+K is the shortcut for Right Click + Character.
 
All your help is going to make things much easier for me.  I will be sure to share it all with my friends who also use ECCO.
 
Now I need to check out Eccoext to see what that offers.  Just getting the mouse wheel to scroll will be a big plus.
 
Then I'll say some prayers that a kind soul will develop a line-spacing format option.
 
Again, thanks for all your kind help.  It will pay off for me every day.