outline

Approaching a writing project logically has many benefits for the writer, not the least of which is better organization. This is where WhizFolders Organizer Pro enters the scene. It's a powerful word processing and outlining suite designed to help writers improve their productivity and work habits, but where it shines is in helping people capture new ideas when they strike. It's optimized for writing tasks, but its ability to quickly save your ideas, notes, and jottings and integrate them in an overall narrative is useful not just for writers but also for entrepreneurs, artists, project managers, executives, and … Read more

Tinderbox is a professional-grade information-management tool for creating, organizing, using, and sharing notes--especially large or complex sets of data, whether you're composing a novel, drafting a presentation, or performing academic research. Tinderbox has a very visual interface that provides a lot of flexibility, giving you multiple options for viewing notes (in map, outline, timeline, chart, treemap, or explorer windows), which you can drag and drop into hierarchical "containers" along with various contextual properties and links. A powerful, open-ended system of "agents"--basically, persistent searches--scans your notes continuously, identifying patterns or attributes and then executing macro-like … Read more

MemPad is a free tool for taking plain text notes and saving them in one large, searchable file with a highly structured index that enables not only typical file management features but also the ability to create wide-ranging links between saved notes, Web pages, network locations, and local files and folders. You can even insert variables into links to do things like run programs and open files.

MemPad is compact and fully portable, so it requires no full installation to run, even from a portable device like a USB drive. It stores everything in its data file in the default … Read more

Well, we thought we were testing DD Thought Tickler, but, after installing the program, we found what we'd gotten was Thought Retriever, which, according to the publisher, is "another application that's built on Dynamic Draw..." Wait, what's Dynamic Draw? For software designed to reduce confusion, not increase it, it was a bad start. Regardless of which program this is, it did nothing to organize our thoughts or increase our productivity.

The Thought Retriever interface features a gridlike panel with vague commands along the top, bottom, and sides. Not knowing where to start, we consulted the … Read more

OmniOutliner is a popular, long-lived tool for building and organizing informational outlines--whether you're taking notes for a class, building out a complex project spec, or anywhere in between. OmniOutliner can help you create rich, multi-column, collapsible outlines in almost any style or format, with support for embedded notes, images, links, and more. Novices will have an easy time getting started with this flexible app's well-designed interface, but there's also plenty of room for power users to learn and exploit OmniOutliner's more heavy-duty features, including batch searching and support for AppleScript.

Given the abundance of competitive "… Read more

Debrief offers users a fast way to take down notes and stay on top of their ideas. With its simple layout and directions, this tool will find many fans.

The program's interface may initially worry some, but they will soon discover most of the icons crowding the top of this program are unnecessary. A few minutes of experimenting and clicking around will serve the user much better than a trip to the Help file, though it's available. The program functions primarily as a note-taker. Users click on an icon to write a note and treat it like a … Read more

Tinderbox is a professional-grade information-management tool for creating, organizing, using, and sharing notes--especially large or complex sets of data, whether you're composing a novel, drafting a presentation, or performing academic research. Tinderbox has a very visual interface that provides a lot of flexibility, giving you multiple options for viewing notes (in map, outline, chart, treemap, or explorer windows), which you can drag and drop into hierarchical "containers" along with various contextual properties and links. A powerful, open-ended system of "agents"--basically, persistent searches--scans your notes continuously, identifying patterns or attributes and then executing macro-like actions. … Read more

Years ago, I promised my cousin Bill (who doesn't have a TV show, by the way) that I would convert the family tree he had created into a Web page. It was pretty easy to find various JavaScripts that let you open menus and submenus, either by clicking or simply by hovering over them.

The only problem was the unwieldy HTML coding required to ensure that the lists opened and closed, as expected. What ended up working better for me was Microsoft Word's Outline view, which lets you use headings to show and hide information in a tree … Read more

There's a great little feature in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions of the word-processing program that lets you export to PowerPoint an outline of any Word file formatted with headings. I admit that it's a specialized operation that probably doesn't get used all that often, but it's a handy way to work between the two Office apps.

I was all set to tell you how to use the feature in Word 2007 when I realized it has been removed. So all that noise Microsoft made when the new Office System was released more than a … Read more