Some good stuff by our own Steve Zeoli:

http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/announcing-the-onenote-smack-down/

Great review, Steve! I was a bit surprised though to see Scrivener on the list, as I never really thought of it as an outliner. Looking forward to the next instalments!

Thanks for the plug.

I include Scrivener in this show down because I want to test how good an outliner it really is. I am trying to include outliners that use a variety of approaches... and frankly the number of straight outlining programs in Windows that are actively being developed is not long. Today I hope to post a review of UV Outliner.

Suggestions from this forum for other outliners to include are welcome. I'm not including hierarchical organizers like MyInfo, MyBase, UltraRecall.

Thanks, again!

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

I include Scrivener in this show down because I want to test how
good an outliner it really is. I am trying to include outliners that use a variety of
approaches...

I suppose Whizfolders would be then in the same category (there was a discussion on Scrivener vs. Whizfolders here recently).

and frankly the number of straight outlining programs in Windows that

are actively being developed is not long.

Unfortunately this criterion eliminates my other all-time favourite, Natara Bonsai 5 Desktop Edition, although it works perfectly with Win7 still.

I can see adding WhizFolders to the lineup. It hadn't occurred to me at the time. The reason WF might qualify when UltraRecall wouldn't is that it seems to me that WF is built for writing -- as Scrivener is. Also -- and I need to check this -- I seem to remember that you can export the outline only.

Thanks for that suggestion!

SZ

Interesting, Steve.

For no very good reasons, I'd always regarded OneNote highly. Having read your review I've revised my opinion. It's an interesting moment too, as MS appear to be pushing OneNote as a star attraction of Office 2013.

Unless one of your other choices delivers a clean knockout blow, I'd also be interested in how NoteMap and EccoPro match up (assuming, that is, that you'd be willing to turn your series from a sprint into more of a marathon - to mix metaphors).

(P.S. There's no better person to carry out such a comparison.)

I like OneNote in general (with the exception of a few frustrating aspects). But I'm not high on it as an outliner.

When I finish this iteration of reviews, I may, should I still have steam in the boilers, try a comparison with the antique outliners. That could be interesting.

And thanks for the compliment -- I think most of the people on this forum are at least as knowledgeable as I am. Heck most of what I have learned about outliners came from this forum and Ted Goranson's great articles at the now defunct ATPM.

SZ

Hugh wrote:

I'd also be interested in how NoteMap and EccoPro match up (assuming, that is, that you'd be willing to turn your series from a sprint into more of a marathon - to mix metaphors).

======
Use NoteMap at your own risk. I once recommended it highly...until it permanently lost a large amount of text I had written. When it came out with a second version, even the easiest-to-fix bug in Version 1 had not been fixed. Its development has ceased.

Personally, I use Inspiration when I need a single-pane outliner. Some of the operations seem a bit clunky at first, and search is simplistic, but I've never found a bug--it is stable. Also, as it is sold to school systems, it should have a long term viability. Finally, it can be used to create diagrams that are "connected" to an outline, although the diagrams can be more complex than can be completely converted to an outline.

Steve Z,

You left out of your list of criteria "import power." For example, Inspiration can do a very good job of importing .rtf documents, including preserving the outline structure if the outline structure of the .rtf document uses tabs for outline levels.

The 'series' has started as a veritable tour de force and holds great promise for future installments! Bravo Steve, I hope that your posts will be for Windows what ATPO was for the Mac world.

A couple of comments / suggestions:

- My first idea was to propose that you include Sense, which I believe is currently the most powerful Windows outliner. I must say that the learning curve can be considerable, so maybe this rules it out.

- It might also make sense to include Microsoft's own Powerpoint; I know that at least one contributor in this forum recommends it for brainstorming and I must say that I have often used it with good results when there has been nothing else around.

- Re features, I will agree with Cassius; I find importing important (pun not intended). Most significantly however, for your own criteria, export should include tab indented text in addition to OPML. I am under the impression that UV outliner's text export maintains the hierarchy. Unfortunately, I am unable to test it, as I am out of office and working on a Linux notebook these days.

Cassius and Alexander,

I hadn't originally thought of rating these applications on their import ability because I view them as places to create information, not suck it in from elsewhere. However, I respect your opinions on this and will likely add a separate article at the end which reviews how well they do on import.

Cassius, I just posted my review of Inspiration. You'll be glad to see it scores very well, a surprise for me. Being surprised by applications is one of the reasons I started this exercise, so I was pleased by this.

Alexander, I'll take a look at Sense. I am also considering adding MaxThink to the queue, but I'm not sure I can consider it a living application at this point, as it has been almost three years since its last update.

Steve Z.

Another review criterion I'd suggest is the ability to view the outline and the developing text (i.e. any more detailed notes, inline or otherwise) at different levels of detail (e.g. top level outline, sentence outline, detailed outline with notes, which in its fullest form could be the complete text where outline items become headers).

This criterion gives rise to another: the ability to transition smoothly from outline to full text. Many outliners lack such finesse and this transition takes place after the export in a word processor. However, I'd expect a good outliner to handle this prior to the export as well.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

When I finish this iteration of reviews, I may, should I
still have steam in the boilers, try a comparison with the antique outliners. That
could be interesting.

Hey, as a bit of an antique myself, I would appreciate your continuing with the exercise. Thank you so much for doing this series of reviews. It is interesting to see how well Inspiration holds up after all these years. I contributed a few posts about it eleven(!) years ago on outliners.com but couldn't keep up with the CRIMP arms race so have been mostly an interested lurker since then. I'm looking forward with great anticipation to see how you appraise Scrivener in this context

If you do still have enough steam to revisit the antiques, I would love to see your appraisal for Ecco Pro as updated today with the Ecco Pro extension. While it probably fails the modernity test in its exporting abilities, I have been amazed at how much this dedicated programmer "slangmgh" has souped up the capabilities of this supposedly extinct program.

I have just posted the latest addition to the series of reviews attempting to uncover the "best" outlining application for Windows:

http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/one-note-smack-down-iii-bonsai/

You'll notice that it is Natara Bonsai, which I decided to add based upon Dr Andus's strong recommendation. I have scratched Scrivener for Windows from the competition, which I explain at the start of the Bonsai review.

Anyway, just a reminder, these reviews are not of the whole application, but just of how well the facilitate straight outlining, as I sort of defined it in the first post in the series.

Steve Z.

Hey Stephen, excellent reviews sir. I'm new to this 'outliner' context of productivity software - so these reviews have been enlightening.

Like others here I'm really enjoying Steve Z's series of reviews. Thanks Steve for taking the time. It is much appreciated.

Some random observations follow:

I wonder whether the high rating of OneNote in other forums is because they are using a broader definition of "outliner" than we would use here. I suspect many people would call any software with a tree pane or note tabs outlining software. As it happens, I have been a satisfied user of OneNote since its launch. It is particularly effective for organising data, but I wouldn't use it if I wanted to outline ideas in a detailed structure.

I have had a licence for Inspiration for longer than I care to remember, but find it a very frustrating program. The UI and I have never got along and I am constantly feeling that I am fighting againt it. It is not as intuitive as it should be for an educational app. The other problem is its looks. Fonts are not presented in the outline at the correct size (at least 2 points below what it says at the bottom of the screen). When I asked Inspiration about this some time back, they acknowledged that it was an issue and was a hangover from porting the software from the Mac version. I would not be as generous as Steve was in his scoring of Ease of Use.

Conversely, I would rate the bonus feature in Inspiration of diagrammatic representations more highly. Unless you go into the likes of MindManager, Inspiration is the only software that I can recall that allows you to toggle on the fly between a text based and graphical outline. That's close to a killer feature in my book.

I'm particularly interested in the assessment of Noteliner which is coming up next.

Jack

Jack Crawford wrote:

I have had a licence for Inspiration for longer than I care to remember,
but find it a very frustrating program. The UI and I have never got along and I am
constantly feeling that I am fighting againt it. It is not as intuitive as it should be
for an educational app.

---
Yes it is "clunky." I have a nephew (now an attorney) who hated it. I had the same problem as you with respect to the interface, but I've "grown accustomed to its face."
---

The other problem is its looks. Fonts are not presented in the outline at the correct size (at least 2 points below what it says at the bottom of the screen). When I asked Inspiration about this some time back, they acknowledged that it was an issue and was a hangover from porting the software from the Mac version.

---
To enlarge fonts, just click on the "big" mountain in the lower left corner.

Other hints:
If in editing mode, click on the outline item and press ESC. That puts you in outline mode and up-down arrows shift you from one outline item to another. CTRL-arrow shifts you to outline items at the same level.

If in outline mode, the left arrorw puts you into edit mode at the beginning of the outline item. CTRL-right arrorw puts you at its end.

It's not GrandView, but I don't know of a better, single pane outliner for Windows. (NoteMap could have been except for bugs, including ones that lost content.)

Steve,

I'm posting here a note on XML export as it applies to all outliners and not just Bonsai. Also, because I think it would be useful for others who might have expectations from XML import/export.

XML is a universal format, much like ASCII or CSV. In brief, it includes the following info: hierarchy, fields names and values.

The format is as flexible as can be, to the extent that it provides no limitations or standards in terms of what field names one should use, or what kind of values can be included. Therefore, one outliner may call the tree items "nodes" and another "branches". One may accept names 256 characters long, and another allow for full paragraphs of text in titles. So outliners are not able to recognise each other's XML out of the box. Some kind of conversion is required, from one outliner's XML format to another. For example, I have found tools for converting Freemind XML to Gantt Project XML. In theory one can convert any XML variation to any other, but programming knowledge or an (expensive) special tool will be required.

Some XML formats have become de facto 'standards' because of the popularity of the originating software. E.g. Microsoft Project XML can be read and written by a variety of software including Rational Plan, MindView etc. In fact, this goes for all Microsoft Office *x formats (.docx, .xlsx...) which are just XML documents inside a zip container.

In the outliner world, Freemind/Freeplane XML and MindManager XML are variations that quite a few programs and online services can read/write.

There is of course OPML, an XML variation which you will find can be read/written by many programs. The downside is that it includes very limited information.

You can explore any XML document with a program such as Microsoft's free XML Notepad.

Yes, like Alexander I felt there was perhaps a mild misunderstanding or misapprehension of XML in Steve's otherwise excellent review of Bonsai. XML is a great intermediary, but does nothing at all without an interpreter (and/or an interpreting template, generally referred to as an XSLT). Bit like a very, very sophisticated CSV file, really. Well, not really, but that's a reasonable analogy ;-)

I've just stripped down my iPad (getting gunked up with/slowed down by apps!) and reinstalled just my faves. Which has led to the rediscovery of one of my favourite outliners, ThinkBook. Under the hood you'll find some very interesting XML (you can only see it in the backup files, which are pure text), with hooks and options for all sorts of future expansions. But the author is sensibly taking the whole thing very steadily, not adding in all the bells and whistles at once (so the diametric opposite of Bonsai). This will also mean he can create desktop - or indeed web, or Android, etc. etc. - clients (if he feels so inclined) that will interpret his XML for desktop/mobile users. But what it also means is that if you were a cunning sort you could design your own client that interpreted his XML files any way you wanted them to (e.g. taking advantage of his hidden XML hooks for "Due date" and so on).

MadaboutDana wrote:

Yes, like Alexander I felt there was perhaps a mild misunderstanding or
misapprehension of XML in Steve's otherwise excellent review of Bonsai. XML is a
great intermediary, but does nothing at all without an interpreter (and/or an
interpreting template, generally referred to as an XSLT). Bit like a very, very
sophisticated CSV file, really. Well, not really, but that's a reasonable analogy
;-)

I have to admit I've never figured out what the XML export in Bonsai is really for, as I was happy enough with the OPML export. But in the Global Settings there are two options for XML Export: "Include DTD reference" and "Include XSLT reference." Does anyone know what these actually do?

Since an XML document can be structured in any way, the DTD defines what elements to expect in the document for it to be valid. It's asking if there's a reference to an external file defining that.

The exported XML file can also refer to an XSLT document that would transform the XML file into another format, say a Web page or a table.

You can still make use of XML files without those. Those are intended for the programming-oriented. If you were so inclined you could set it up to automatically transform that XML file into a more useful format for you, such as for a report or to more easily import it into another program.

We should point out that many programs now use XML invisibly. Word's .docx format, for example, is really a zip file that you can unzip and see the XML hidden inside. Same with Excel's xslx.

http://www.w3schools.com/dtd/dtd_intro.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/

Thanks for all the added commentary. I am learning something about XML, which I always assumed was more universal and open format... i.e. like any program can read a plain text document. I thought any outliner could or should be able to open XML. I was obviously conflating it with OPML.

Dr Andus, re OPML export in Bonsai, I see no option for this when I export. Is it hidden behind a different name?

I'll be working on the Noteliner review over the next couple of days, but FYI, a new build was released yesterday for those of you already using it.

http://www.noteliner.org/i/Main.html

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Dr Andus, re OPML export in Bonsai, I see no
option for this when I export. Is it hidden behind a different name?

Hi Steve,
at least in my version (5.0.3) it's under File > Export, under the horizontal line which separates the two halves (though I don't really get why the different file formats are divided into those two groups).

Mark,
thanks for the DTD/XSLT explanation.

Strange. There is no such OPML export option in my version of Bonsai, which I only downloaded and installed last week, so it should be the latest. I'm using Bonsai in trial mode. Maybe you have to pay for it to get the OPML export option.

Dr Andus wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Dr Andus, re OPML export in Bonsai, I see no
>option for this
when I export. Is it hidden behind a different name?

Hi Steve,
at least in my version
(5.0.3) it's under File > Export, under the horizontal line which separates the two
halves (though I don't really get why the different file formats are divided into
those two groups).

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Strange. There is no such OPML export option in my version of Bonsai, which I only
downloaded and installed last week, so it should be the latest. I'm using Bonsai in
trial mode. Maybe you have to pay for it to get the OPML export option.

To be more precise, these are all the export options on mine:

CSV File...
Text File...
HTML...
XML...
Bonsai Palm OS Format...
html example
MPX Project Exchange Format
opml
RTF - MS Word
text example
xml example