Tool that allows showing and hiding of rows and columns of information ?

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Posted by ndodge
Dec 17, 2008 at 04:10 PM

After using outliners, I want to be able to show/hide, expand/collapse things in other types of apps, too. Often I have some information that is best viewed/edited in a table layout. I’ve tried MS Word, but hiding/showing rows/columns is not really possible that I know of (except for a cludgy approach to make text hidden and miminize row/col size). MS Excel actually looked promising, as hiding/showing rows/columns is built in and works well. However, some of my cells need to contain a fair amount of text, and ideally indented bulleted lists (well, ideally, a mini outline in each cell, but I’m not expecting that ability). Excel just does not handle well any amount of formatted text within a cell. OneNote is another option, but I’ve found that it isn’t mature enough yet (when I make tables I find myself fighting the tool constantly to get column widths as I want them, and although it has expand/collapse of bulleted lists, the outlining function is very crude and gives no indication that a level is collapsed).

So, my end question is, wondering if there are other tools out there as alternatives ? Something like MS Word tables that allow for show/hide, or something like Excel where formatted text within a cell is more supported.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 17, 2008 at 04:36 PM

I am not sure about show/hide, but for lots of text within table cells I would suggest that you try out a rather idiosynchratic freeware tool known as Notebox Disorganizer ( http://www.geocities.com/goosnargh37/ ). The developer is also a writer, by the way, and this has apparently lead to some interesting features.

I would also expect the rapidly developed InfoQube / SQL Notes to be able to do much of what you are looking for and more, though it might take some learning.

Cheers
Alexander

Posted by Ken
Dec 17, 2008 at 04:40 PM

You may also want to take a look at AM Notebook: http://www.aignes.com/notebook.htm . I believe that it is portable, and they have a free version. I am not sure if it will meet all of your needs, but it is worth a look.

—Ken

Posted by ndodge
Dec 17, 2008 at 06:24 PM

Thank you for the suggestions for these tools. However, I do want to have it be more like a word processor where I can see the contents of the entire table, if desired, or to shrink the table if desired. Right now I’m using a big Word table and view it in Web Layout view, and I can shrink/hide columns occasionally by marking the text in a column as hidden. My hope, I guess, was that there was a word processor that had good table support that also supported hiding of columns and rows in tables.

Posted by David Dunham
Dec 18, 2008 at 03:38 AM

ndodge wrote:

>So, my end question is, wondering if there are other tools out there as
>alternatives ? Something like MS Word tables that allow for show/hide, or something
>like Excel where formatted text within a cell is more supported.

I haven’t used it much this way, but Numbers (for Mac OS X) lets you hide any column or row, and you can have formatted text (including graphics) in a cell.

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