I've been a huge fan of outline processors since time immemorial. I've been using outlines to plan projects since before some of you were born. I've used ThinkTank, MORE, Acta, Inspiration, and even Microsoft Word's sorry excuse for an outliner over the years. But it wasn't until recently that I found a Mac OS X outline processor that felt just right to me.

But I finally found one and it is called OmniOutliner 3. It's easy to use yet it offers dozens of best-of-class features. Better still, you can perform almost every task at least two and often three different ways, so it's easy to make OmniOutliner 3 work just the way you like it to work.

Among my favorite features are the five Inspectors (shown on the right side of Figure 1). The inspectors make it a breeze to format any word, line, paragraph, or column and view the results instantly. I also like the way you can display or hide multi-paragraph inline notes several ways. Another cool touch is the ability to not only add multiple columns, but to add columns with different attributes for checkboxes, pop-up lists, dates, numerical values (which it can also calculate dynamically), or just plain text.

OmniOutliner 3.

OmniOutliner 3 comes in two versions—Standard and Pro, priced at $39.95 and $69.95 respectively. Both versions offer styles, multiple column types, attachments, lots of export options, AppleScript support, batch find, and inline notes. The Pro version adds folded editing, sections, named styles, clipping service, audio recording, and saved templates.

You can download a trial version of either version at: http://www.omnigroup.com.

The Bottom Line
If you need to make an outline, nothing does it better than either version of OmniOutliner.