OmniOutliner: A Mature Outlining Application

When it comes to organization, one of the most simple things you can do to organize data is create an outline. OmniOutliner is an application that allows you to create an outline without hindering your thought process. Many of you have probably heard of OmniOutliner and may even have it on your Mac if you bought a MacBook when Apple was packaging OmniOutliner with them.

The main window of OmniOutliner is quite minimal, opting to have many of the formatting control etc., in an inspector. This makes for a very clean and distraction free window with only 5 buttons (7 in the pro version). The inspector has 5 parts to it, Appearance, Row, Column, Document and Style Attributes, each with it’s own options for editing an element of your outline.

The Appearance pane lets you style everything to do with your outline’s text, like color, font, weight, shadow, border etc.

The Row pane lets you change the formatting of your rows. You can change the numbering of each row, the indentations of each row and it’s children, and more.

Adding a column to your outline will let you see some of the more complex features of OmniOutliner. Once you have a column, you can configure it in the Column pane. You can choose whether your column will hold a Checkbox, Date, Duration, Pop-up, Number or Rich Text. Once you have chosen a type, you can choose how to format it. For example, if you choose “Number” for the type, you can format it as “9,999.99, 9999.99, $9999” etc. Each type has it’s own settings. Finally, you can choose to have a summary of an item’s children displayed in the top of the column (in the screenshot above you can see that all of the prices of the applications are summarized in the parent item).

The Document pane allows you to style pretty much everything else about your outline that isn’t text. You can choose to have alternate rows a different color (to make your outline easier to read), add horizontal/vertical grid lines, and add metadata (copyright, version, authors, keywords etc.).

The final pane in the inspector is the Style Attributes pane. This pane shows the different styles that are being applied to the current selection. You can revert to the defaults by clicking the little “x” beside each style.

Besides text, OmniOutliner also lets you embed other media, like photos, audio files, and video. When dragging media in, you can choose to have the file directly within the outline, or have it aliased. If you plan on sending your outline around, you should keep the files within the outline, but if not, you can keep the file size of your outline down by having OmniOutliner just refer to the file on your hard drive.

When printing, you can customize the different elements that will show, so only the information that you want will be printed.

OmniOutliner comes in two flavors, a standard version and a pro version. The pro version allows you to record notes into your outline, clip items (through the Services menu) from other applications, create multiple document templates, as well as other small enhancements. Unlike some other companies who offer pro versions of their apps, the standard version of OmniOutliner does not feel limiting to me without the features that the pro version offers. If you can see yourself using the pro version, it costs $69.95, as opposed to $39.95 for the standard version, which you can purchase from their store.

At version 3.6.5, OmniOutliner is quite refined, making it a very useable application. For some people, this sort of application might be overkill, as you can make an outline in a simple text-editor, but there is no denying that OmniOutliner certainly makes it easy to create simple or complex outlines. The OmniGroup has some great tutorials by Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline on their website if you would like to see OmniOutliner in action.

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