I am looking for an outliner for thesis writing, that works in two dimensions:

first dimension, the classical document structure:

1. chapter
about cats
1.1 section
about black cats
1.1.1 subsection
folk tales, history,

second dimension, different revisions or anotations

chapter titles | 2. keywords | 3. initial draft | 4. feedback by Mr.X | 5 second draft
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. chapter | about cats | cats are plants... | this is wrong | cats are animals...
1.1 section | black cats |
1.1.1 subsection | folk tales etc. |

For writing a rather long thesis, I tried this method.
It worked really well, but was a pain to manage, since I used normal tables in word

Is there a program that can do this better?

Hugo,

If I correctly understand your request, I believe there are at least two options for you to take a look at:

1. The recently discussed InfoQube allows you to have columns as part of your outline. (Don't remember the URL, but the other active topic includes the link.)
2. MyInfo does a wonderful job with columns. (www.milenix.com)

Steve Z.

Thanks!

MyInfo is not exactlyy what I am looking for, at least on a first look: It appears that the table is not part of the outline, instead each outline entry can have its own table

InfoQube looks closer, apparently the name for what I want is a "single-pane rich text outliner with columns"

Still somewhat problematic, the columns in the single-page view do not seem suitable for entering several paragraphs of text per cell. I could not find a way to enter a line-break for example.

I have made a mock-up of what I am imagining, hope that clears things up a bit
[IMG]http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/7875/vollbildaufzeichnung050.jpg[/IMG]

For now it seems word is still the best option. Not a very good best option though.

Excel?
----------------------------------------
I have made a mock-up of what I am imagining, hope that clears things up a bit
[IMG]http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/7875/vollbildaufzeichnung050.jpg[/IMG]

Hugo wrote:

InfoQube looks closer, apparently the name for what I want is a ?single-pane rich text outliner with columns?

Still somewhat problematic, the columns in the single-page view do not seem suitable for entering several paragraphs of text per cell. I could not find a way to enter a line-break for example.

-------------------------

You could use IQ to create a grid as in your mock-up. Shift-enter adds a line-break. You can also bold text, etc, but no bullets. I do not think it is a very good application for what you want however.

To use IQ for this kind of work, I would add sub-items under each item, and either (1) enter the content there or (2) use the HTML pane. Use a column to qualify what revision it is (first draft, second, ... final). Filtering will allow you to view / print / export each version separately.

Editing in Excel is tedious, so Word is probably the way to go. Printing each version is however not possible with Word

One question... when the content of cells are large (i.e. many paragraphs), this system still works for you?

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

You could use IQ to create a grid as in your
mock-up. Shift-enter adds a line-break. You can also bold text, etc, but no bullets. I
do not think it is a very good application for what you want however.

To use IQ for this
kind of work, I would add sub-items under each item, and either (1) enter the content
there or (2) use the HTML pane. Use a column to qualify what revision it is (first draft,
second, ... final). Filtering will allow you to view / print / export each version
separately.

Interesting. I will have to look into this some more. I agree with your conclusion thought.

One question... when the content of
cells are large (i.e. many paragraphs), this system still works for you?

With small font sizes, large screen sizes, large paper sizes, some horizontal scrolling: yes, it works.
It did not work great, but I found it useful.

it is a hack thought, and it all breaks down if there are figures and tables in the text.

Printing each version is however not possible with Word

Printing an individual version was actually possible in Word too:
copy the specific column into a new document, convert table to text, adjust font size.

What word is lacking are the actual outliner capabilites. Word has a good basic outline mode, but not within tables.
So I cannot hide and manipulate individual subtrees on command, and neither can I hide individual columns easily.

If you're on Windows, I'd suggest using OneNote. You'll need a one-row table per paragraph if you want to keep collapsing and expanding items, but in OneNote that's easy enough... just pressing tab after typing something creates a one row table and adds a column.

I saw a new Mac outliner a couple of months ago that allowed precisely this... essentially outlining with collapsability either vertically (like a conventional outliner) or horizontally, simultaneously. It makes better use of space. The name of that program escapes me at the moment. There's also a Windows program that divides your page into boxes and subboxes, which is a similar idea, but its outlining capability is a little weak. You might also consider OmniOutliner, which is a columnar outliner. Like InfoQube, you have to press a key+enter to enter line breaks when you're in columns.

-- Chris

Chris Thompson wrote:

I saw a new Mac outliner a couple of months ago that allowed precisely
this... essentially outlining with collapsability either vertically (like a
conventional outliner) or horizontally, simultaneously. It makes better use of
space. The name of that program escapes me at the moment.

Chris, I think you're thinking of Top of Tree: http://www.topoftree.jp/en/tree/

Steve

I use TreeSheets for this very thing. http://treesheets.com/
Another I tried is Matrex, I found it on sourceforge. http://sourceforge.net/projects/matrex/ but it is really for working with data rather than text.

Take a look at Notecase. Its got some of this capability.

Tom S.

While not an outliner, another option you should look into is the quirky Notebox Disorganizer, which allows you to build a table of rich text notes. It hasn't had a major update in a while, and the developer seems to view the whole venture as a lark, but it is free and very light on resources.

http://mysite.verizon.net/squirreltech/software/index.html

Steve Z.

I've posted a similar question to this in the past. When working with some data, a tabular view is most natural. However, after working with outliners so much I want to be able to collapse or show/hide sections and columns. Excel can show/hide columns, but it is cumbersome (no easy way to do bullets, lots of text in a cell gets unwieldy, cumbersome newline issue in cells, if you show/hide rows then row autoheight doesn't work (uses height of hidden rows))

Word tables with bulleted lists within cells actually work pretty good but there is not an easy way that I know of to show/hide rows and columns (I got close with some VBA macros essentially programmatically changing column width, but it didn't quite work how I wanted, can't remember exact details).

OneNote can kind of do this but certain things about OneNote just bug me too much for me to use it for any length of time (it is too unstructured, I hate it that there are no visual indicators to indicate that something is collapsed, it kind of feels like Word sometimes but has so little formatting as compared to Word, and other things).

Treesheets is very intriguing but lacks a collapse feature, last I looked. Some of the other Windows tools are just too klunky/ugly to work in, and they don't seem to quite have rich text, collapsable, multi-line text in cells anyway.

TopOfTree looks very interesting. It figures, I guess -- another tool I'd love to use at work and at home that is only available on a Mac.

I discovered something related that makes doing this sort of thing in Word a little more doable. If you select a row or column in a table and set the font to hidden, the highlighted text disappears. For a row, the row itself disappears, but for a column, the column remains but the text is hidden. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write a macro which would both make the font hidden and "collapse" the column to a small width, and to then have another macro which would make the font unhidden and make the column a wider width. For hiding rows, it might be possible to make a macro which would both make the font of the row hidden and thicken the border of a neighboring row as an indicator that a hidden row is present. Indented bulleted lists work pretty good in Word, and although the bullets can't be collapsed like an outline, perhaps making a document where the amount of bulleted text in any given cell is manageable, with the ability to hide a whole row or column, might get this technique closer to the notion of outlining within rows and columns.

Hi Hugo,

This maybe is a dumb question (I'm not a writer myself and I'm developing a Word addin for writers), but I don't quite understand in what circumstances you want to view multiple revisions of the text at the same time in the same row of the outliner? Thank you.

--
Edwin Yip
Writing Outliner - Turn Microsoft Word into an all-in-one writing software.
http://WritingOutliner.com