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Outline with rows and columns?
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Aug 6, 2009 at 03:37 PM
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.
Posted by ndodge
Nov 1, 2009 at 04:04 AM
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.
Posted by ndodge
Nov 4, 2009 at 11:46 PM
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.
Posted by Edwin Yip
Nov 13, 2009 at 03:35 AM
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