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.

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

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

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.

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.