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Outliner that allows you to work per hierarchy level
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Posted by Lucine
Feb 17, 2023 at 12:39 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
Check out the Level Selector in Outline 4D (Win only):
>
>https://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/outline-4d-for-drafting-and-reverse-outlining/
Dr. Andus, YES thank you so much for this suggestion! This software seems INCREDIBLY powerful. I am getting “software high” from seeing the idea so well-implemented :D And your suggestion for adding tags to Workflowy that way is great as well, works as a quick solution when there are only a few items.
Posted by Lucine
Feb 17, 2023 at 12:42 PM
@Jon, it’s not really hoisting that I’m looking for, since Hoisting shows the parent hierarchies for each “item” that I want to isolate. For example, if I only want level 3 items from each tree, then it would show me level 1 + level 2+ level 3 for Item 1, then the same 3 levels for item 2, and so on. Whereas I was looking to isolate ONLY items of level 3 and not have levels 1 and 2 be visible.
Posted by Jon Polish
Feb 17, 2023 at 02:06 PM
I see. I think InfoQube can be set to do this, although Pierre would have to advise.
Jon
Posted by Amontillado
Feb 17, 2023 at 02:23 PM
Devonthink will do this, although you have to take steps to preserve manual sort order.
Create a smart group (filter, sort of). Tell it to search in the group (folder) you’re interested in for things of any type document. Click the “exclude subgroups” option. Any time you click on that smart group you’ll see just the documents in that folder, nothing above, nothing below, and no subgroups will appear.
You can do that without creating a smart group by doing the same thing with the search bar. Selecting which group to search in is done by clicking the group in the sidebar/navigation pane.
If you want to preserve a manually set ordering in a smart group, there is a handy renumber script available that will prepend an index number to the name of each file so an alpha sort will be the same as a manual sort. The sort order in smart groups is always alpha.
The renumber script will also clean up after itself. You can tell it to add numbers, which will also recreate new index numbers, and you can tell it to remove the numbers it prepended.
Very pricey as an outliner, but also sort of a swiss army knife for document warehousing.
Lucine wrote:
@Jon, it’s not really hoisting that I’m looking for, since Hoisting
>shows the parent hierarchies for each “item” that I want to isolate. For
>example, if I only want level 3 items from each tree, then it would show
>me level 1 + level 2+ level 3 for Item 1, then the same 3 levels for
>item 2, and so on. Whereas I was looking to isolate ONLY items of level
>3 and not have levels 1 and 2 be visible.
Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 17, 2023 at 05:12 PM
Lucine wrote:
>Dr. Andus, YES thank you so much for this suggestion! This software
>seems INCREDIBLY powerful. I am getting “software high” from seeing the
>idea so well-implemented :D
I have to warn you though that this is quite an old software and it does have some bugs where the software crashes and you lose unsaved data (it was already happening on Win7, I have no idea how well it runs on Win10 or Win11).
I haven’t used it for a while, but when I was using it, I was able to isolate those bugs (essentially had to do with choosing some pull-down menu functions under certain conditions that made the software crash, and found the timeline view generally unstable) and so I learnt to avoid triggering them.
But it is a good idea to hit CTRL+S regularly, to avoid data loss.
Also, I wouldn’t pay full price for it. The seller has promotions for it several times a year (I see that right now they are selling it at USD$54.95, instead of the usual $99.95).
I mean it is an amazing piece of software, one of the most creative outliners I’ve ever seen, but you have to accept that it will never be updated and can crash on you regularly.