This page has not been updated since 2004 and is no longer being maintained. Overview of Windows Outlining Programs This page documents my usage of outlining program, and a few other information-organizing program (such as free text databases, and the occasional hybrid organizer/idea-generator). These programs are also known as knowledge management tools, a text database, a document database, or an information database. Is there a Windows-based outliner or information organizer I've missed? If so, please email me about it. I maintain a separate page reviewing graphical idea organizing and brainstorming tools. If you want to contribute a few paragraph's commentary on one of these programs, I will welcome the help. I don't regularly use most of these programs (my review is usually based on an hour or two of experimenting), and I am doubtlessly missing many subtle benefits various packages provide.
I am a big fan of hierarchically organized information, more commonly known as outlines. In the early '90s, I used a DOS program called GrandView and when I moved to Windows eventually converted to Ecco, which was discontinued (but still works fine) in the late '90s. All the software development that I have done over the past five years has been completely organized inside Ecco. Many projects require thousands of features to be taken into account, then organize into designs, revisions, testing and documentation. Usually I supplement my outlining with a more free-form organizational metaphor, usually using Lotus Notes. With Lotus Notes, I can combine a hierarchically organized outline view of the documents, with full text searching, hypertext links and traditional relational database like reports (for example, a sorted view of items to do). Using Lotus Notes allows me to organize documents from various tools, such as Visio, Ecco, Microsoft Word, and email messages, something which Ecco all alone cannot do.
One pane vs. two pane vs three pane outliners. Which is best? One pane: When writing documents, or organizing ideas for a project (such as a speech, or for software design) I much prefer one pane outlines. I find they are more conducive to collapsing ideas, because you can mix text with categories, rather than radically splitting the organizational technique from the content (as the two and three pane outlines do). Two panes: Steve Cohen writes: Three panes: I use three-pane outliners for shared projects, where there are many documents in a category that should be isolated from other items. For example, in Lotus Notes we keep various documents on bugs, to-dos, feature requests, etc. The categories let us choose what filter we want to apply to the documents (just view to-dos, just to-dos for a project, etc) and then a 2nd pane displays the documents for that category. Lotus Notes optionally gives you a 3rd pane displaying the selected document, or you can double-click a document to bring it up full screen. Examples of each genre: Ecco Pro is a one pane outliner:
Zoot is 3 page outliner: Catalog of Windows information organizers & outliners
Here's a program I wrote to export Ecco outlines to a format that can be e-mailed and still look nice. Ecco Basics home page: A useful home page with lots of different information about Ecco. Lots of links! http://www.scaevola.com/eccobasics/ Ecco discussion list on Yahoo Groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eccopro/ Ecco Rocks web site: Ivitar makes several shareware companion products for Ecco, include misc Tookit, an Ecco Visual Basic Toolkit for programmers, and a set of utilities TimePieces Software Zone Online . . . Lotus Notes
One major advantage of Lotus Notes is that it allows all the major information organization techniques to be used in one information space: outlines, graphics, hypertext links, relational databases, free (rich) text, expanding/collapsing reports, collapsing rich text sections, tabbed notebooks (like wizards) and tables. In other words, Lotus Notes is a hodgepodge of every information organization technique Lotus could think of, all thrown into one quirky product. As such, it is phenomenally satisfying and phenomenally frustrating at the same time. Because it was never designed to do what it is now, many of its features are baroque in their usage, and while it is possible to do almost anything inside Lotus Notes, it is often frustratingly difficult (thanks to, in part, the support for three separate non- overlapping scripting languages). On the other hand, simple things are breathtakingly easy with Lotus Notes: free text repositories of information, simple relational databases, to do lists, and calendars are all there, and you can modify the existing applications to do more if you need to. Add to this, the recent (Domino version 5) capability for all this to be instantly available over the web, and how incredibly powerful tool. Unfortunately, most companies try to neuter Lotus Notes and turning into a strict application development environment, removing most power from the user. In this capacity, Lotus Notes is less impressive (the Lotus Notes built-in email client is an example), and explains why so many people are under-whelmed after their initial interaction with Lotus Notes. The good news is that Lotus is desperate for new customers, so the product is cheaper and more accessible than ever. Grab an evaluation copy for free at http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/downloads The Notes FAQ is quite useful, and well maintained by Ken Yee at: http://www.keysolutions.com/NotesFAQ/ . . . Inspiration Inspiration is a very interesting graphical outliner, like Visio and Ecco combined, with the ability to move back and forth between a flow-chart and an outline. What's novel about it is its focus on speed: Visio tends to get in the way, so at work we flow-chart on a white board. With Inspiration, it's so quick to use, I don't need to white board! In the coming months, I hope to give Inspiration a real at-work trial, and will put notes about it in here. The outliner looks minimal, but capable (it's only a one-pane outliner, thank goodness!) http://www.inspiration.com/ The various types of creativity techniques the author discusses in Inspiration are: PowerPoint Presentation: Organizing Good Ideas and Careful Thoughts with Inspiration Jot+ Notes
http://www.kingstairs.com/jot/ Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . Skwyrul A beautifully designed and executed no-cost two pane outline program. Well, not quite free: I call it DonationWare, the author calls it "CareWare". It also has a number of the same features that Ecco and InfoRecall have: calendars, palm-integration, searching, columns. Very impressive. http://www.pebble-software.com/ Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . Maple
. . . askSam Before I switched to Lotus Notes in the early '90s, I used a wonderful free text database called askSam. It is still around, though I have not used it in nearly a decade and cannot say what it is like today. Its major feature was its lack of structure: every document was ASCII text, and because it had a very fast text scanning algorithm, there was no need for any of the structure you have to having relational databases to make things work quickly. You can do relational database like things on-the-fly by wrapping the fields with square brackets. This is similar to the sort of thing you can do with Lotus Notes: each document can have its own arbitrary set of fields, except that with askSam you can dynamically vary the fields on a single document as you type (this has both advantages and disadvantages). http://www.asksam.com/ Duncan Macdonald writes: InfoRecall
Steven Cohen writes: . . . InfoSelect
Steven Cohen wrote: Duncan Macdonald wrote: InfoSelect very good but can feel sluggish and heavy. Stores data in a combination of external folders and internal folders; but, encourages external folders be limited to around 1Mb (probably to facilitate backing up to floppy disk and to allow limiting how much is loaded into RAM). Palm version available. Richard Holt contributed this graphic of his InfoSelect setup:
Zoot Information Processor Zoot screen picture: Notice how similar it is to Netscape's news groups interface:
In other words, you have discussion groups (Zoot folders), and message threads, with responses, with each document being the equivalent of a Usenet news posting. Of course, this is my interpretation of Zoot: this is not at all how Zoot advertises itself. The manufacturer's description makes Zoot sound a lot more revolutionary, which it may be, but I didn't see that aspect of it when I briefly tried it. http://www.zootsoftware.com/ Duncan Macdonald writes: Pru Borland writes: . . . TreePad
Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . Accordia It
They also make a related product called InfoTree whose screen pictures look virtually identical to Accordia iT. GoldenSection Notes
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Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . NoteMap NoteMap is a competent basic single-pane outliner, in the style of the Ecco Pro outliner. From the feedback I've received from people who use NoteMap, it appears to be the program everyone has their hopes on as the "pre-eminent outliner", and from what I've seen of the rapidly expanding feature set, this faith is well-placed. For Ecco users: you can paste Ecco outlines from the clipboard into NoteMap: I tested this feature, and it works. NoteMap sports some features that Ecco does not: pop-up comments for each note, and the ability to link to an external file. NoteMap does not yet support hypertext links, though this is apparently in the works, and will be in a near-term version. The program is professional-feeling and not amateurish. I reviewed v1.01, so this is a new program, and it shows: this is currently a simple outlining program, with no frills (no columns or key/value pairs, no filters, no Gantt charts, etc). However, big plans are in store, so I'm told by the developer and from users. One small complaint: the default fonts are too large and too colorful. However, I am told that the newer version (after I evaluated Notemap) a "text style" feature (like MS Word), so you can now permanently set the fonts as you wish, by changing the style sheet. http://www.casesoft.com/notemap/ Duncan Macdonald writes: Email I received from the developer of NoteMap: . . . Leo
http://personalpages.tds.net/~edream/front.html . . . HyPerform
The program appears quite dated, and has not been updated since 1997. Nonetheless, I'm sure it has its adherents. Personally, I found it quite hard to use, and not worth much time investment. One interesting feature I haven't seen elsewhere: "What's changed, and who changed it -- to aid collaboration when coauthoring, an example of HyPerform's "groupware" capabilities." . . . ScopeEdit
Visual SlickEdit is the programmer's editor that I use, and it features similar collapsing functionality (but IMHO, is the best text editor available). . . . Technography Template
Also by the same person (Bernard DeKoven), is the Technography Web Site, and the The author of the Technography Template, Bernard DeKoven, emailed me to say:
MemoryMate MemoryMate is a full text database program, very much in the style of askSam. Documents are stored as notes, with hypertext, full text searches, and templates. The program is being actively developed by the well-regarded shareware publisher, Brown Bag Software. Duncan Macdonald writes: Memorymate for DOS was with PC-Outline, GrandView 2, and possibly askSam, one of my favorite applications and I built an office around it for almost ten years before moving to InfoSelect as the best Windows 95 alternative. Although superficially simpler (minimalist) than Asksam it was rock solid, had an easier GUI, and was a T.S.R. with the unusual ability to copy/paste a full record (120 lines of text) to an underlying word processor such as WordStar at a single pass. It only needed 40-80k of RAM and in my opinion was an overlooked masterpiece. . . . MaxThink MaxThink is the venerable DOS based outliner that has a new beta version for Windows as of 5/1/01, with a release version planned. InfoHandler InfoHandler is a free text database / PIM / outliner. Full of features. . . . PC Outline
Steve Cohen writes: . . . ListPro ListPro by Ilium Software) is very focussed on Palm and PocketPC computers, and if you need to have basic outlines (really: lists of things is ListPro's focus) on both your desktop and palm computer, this is the program for you. Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . Other Outliners and Full text programs Here are some other programs that I have not reviewed, but that readers told me about. Duncan Macdonald writes: Treetext - Two pane outliner written in visual basic 6, a little bulky and slow; also slow development Textpad - superb editor with extraordinarily efficient search engine, lacking only Boolean searches (though experience shows that strings are used for >90% of searches). Makes an excellent alternative to `proper' free text databases and keeps data in discrete files. I find that I tend to use this in preference to InfoSelect 5, and would be happy to use it exclusively. Very low RAM usage. Best value text editing and free text management tool. Garold L. Johnson writes: Shadow Plan is an outliner with a desktop and a Palm version with syncing. Correlate has a free personal version but the commercial products handles Lotus, web and MS Office organization and publishing. Radio Userland is Dave Winer's personal version of his Frontier web server system. It is capable of managing web sites from an outline perspective. It is used to edit many Manila web sites. Other Web Sites . . . More & GrandView An interesting home page discussing More and GrandView, two now long deceased outlining programs. The site also describes various alternative programs and the author's opinions on them. http://www.faughnan.com/more/index.html . . . Creativity Web Charles Cave's Creativity Web, a welcome resource for everything about creativity, including dozens of reviews of creativity software programs. Unfortunately, the site is not kept very up-to-date, but nonetheless contains much valuable information. . . . Outliner Discussion Outliners Discussion list: http://discuss.outliners.com/topics Also see the Ecco discussion (toward the top of this page), which is more generally about outliners these days. . . . Memes.net Many topics concerning ideas, thought, and plenty of other topics. Pages are created and added to by users, so the site rambles quite a bit, but covers many interesting areas, such as outliners and idea managers. . . . Free text databases overview Duncan Macdonald writes: FREE TEXT DATABASES: These come in two or three varieties: First,those that duplicate data from the original formats into a separate archive, presumably optimized for fast access and sometimes indexing. Some of these allow an internal structure of folders and InfoSelect allows its archive to be split into separate Win9x folders. Second, those that leave the data in the original formats and folders but provide tools to search and filter across files and folders. In the past most of these have returned a list of files meeting search criteria, but opening each individually has been slow and tedious. However, programs like Textpad show that this problem can be overcome. A third variation are programs that try to provide a content-centered (document-centered) rather than location centered approach to computing (or data access). Outliners organize and access by location, free text databases by content. This variation provides tools for annotating files and uses these to provide an index from which the files can be accessed quickly. Some of these also provide tools for searching across the individual files. Most seem to encourage moving data into discrete folders, but all work with links to files in their original locations. The latter approach seems more useful, especially as links to internet and intranet sources become more important, but if successful I would expect the file / folder structure to become simpler. Examples of this type are Demios Librarian, The Brain, and Powermarks. . . . Reader comments Duncan Macdonald writes: . . . Thanks to Pru Borland, Stephen Cohen, Garold Johnson, and Duncan Macdonald for their many submissions and comments. |