Apple's wonderful Numbers has just been updated with a raft of new features, including... outlining!

I'm not quite sure how this works yet, because I haven't had a chance to play with it, but a nice picture appears in Viticci's review here: https://www.macstories.net/news/pages-keynote-and-numbers-add-siri-shortcuts-support-and-more/

I'm definitely going to try that out just as soon as I have a spare CRIMPing moment.

Cheers!
Bill

Thanks for this notification, Bill - I'll have to explore it pdq.

Personally, since the days of Lotus 1-2-3 I've thought spreadsheets are wonderful tools and I've always been a fan of the use of them for other than obvious numerical-calculation purposes. (Don't get me wrong - I've also been a fan of using them for numerical modelling, of course.)

Didn't somebody once claim that they'd written a novel in Excel? Now perhaps they could outline it in Numbers.

Bill, what's so special about the outlining feature in Numbers?
In the screenshot it looks like they use simple folding - you could have done that in Excel for years (in German the Excel command is called "Gruppieren" - that would be "Grouping").

You're right, Franz, I'm familiar with Excel's grouping. What I've always loved about Numbers is that it's far more than a spreadsheet program (although I confess I've never felt tempted to write a novel in it!).

The new feature appears to be the Numbers answer to grouping - and it's not desperately transparent. I've been playing with it off and on this morning while doing other much more important things, and it's really not the easiest thing to get a grip on. So it's not really outlining, and it's not really grouping (in the Excel sense) either, although you can use it for the latter. It's almost like pivot tables, in that you can swap category/sub-category positions to analyse your data in different ways. But truly user-friendly it is not.

However: it's a cool new feature in a very cool app, and I'll probably find some way to use it...

That's exactly what it is... it's intended to be a more accessible version of pivot tables. This feature was actually in the Mac version of Numbers some time ago, prior to the huge rewrite that temporarily removed a lot of features. (It might not be as accessible now as it once was though... I find Numbers still a lot clunkier than it used to be when it was a Mac-only app.)

--Chris

MadaboutDana wrote:

It's almost like pivot tables, in that you
can swap category/sub-category positions to analyse your data in
different ways.

One of my favorite tools was XL Notes for Excel which allowed unlimited text (or Word) docs to be created in *each* cell of an Excel spreadsheet. Essentially, this turned Excel into a hugely powerful outliner among other uses. Sadly, after several very unstable version updates, it turned into abandonware years ago.

Despite its status, it's still quite usable in Excel 2010 and I use it every day (and have for years) without problem. In fact, if you search hard enough, you can still find it on the net. The last version produced was V. 8 but the one you want is V. 2. It has a weird installation but it works perfectly and the downloadable file is easily registered.

It is really, *really* useful and it's worth the trouble of finding & installing it. I use it both on my Windows machines and on my Macbook using Parallels.

Hmmm, I don't think I'd call the feature "outlining". As pointed out, it's more like pivot tables in Excel, or Excel's filters. I've tried the feature in Numbers and you need to do a heck of a lot of clicking around and configuring settings to make it look like an outline with folded levels.

I have to agree with you - not really very friendly, unless you're doing data analysis. Although grouping works well enough, and does turn Numbers into a very basic outliner.

Ah well.