Outliners--or, organizing information Back in the early days of personal computers there was a hot new category of software: outliners.

I'm not quite sure what happened to outliners as a category--except that, at least in one case, they became subsumed by an even larger category of software. (BTW, one of the authors of some of the most popular outliners claims he also doesn't quite understand what happened to outliners, either. Maybe it's time for a revival. :)


The first product, ThinkTank, didn't make much of a splash. In fact, it was a product looking for a platform. When the Mac came along--the developers felt they had found it. Unfortunately, Mac didn't take the personal computer industry by storm (the "exclusively" priced Mac kept it out of the hands of many of those panting for that beautiful, though black and white, graphical interface.)

The product that did take the personal computer industry by storm was called "MORE".

(unixheads: Now, those of you of unix background, I can't tell you whether the unix utility "more" came before or after, or if there is any relationship at all between to two.)

(antique software: it turns out, while doing some research for this blog entry, that there is a whole slew of "antique" software that is up on the 'net--including early versions of VisiCalc, Borland's TurboPascal and even the first C compilers.)

Back to outliners:

They are AWESOME.

Where to find them: well, Symantec bought one of the popular versions--and Microsoft has a pretty decent outliner in Microsoft Word. However, as MSFT Word becomes more and more expensive, perhaps there's a place for the re-entry of stand-alone outliners.

I remember using the Outliner in Microsoft Word in the late '80s to write up a specification for some code I wrote (it was a LONG document). Made a huge difference.

Here's a short & quickie as to how to use outliners to tackle inchaote ideas, projects, etc
(I just learned that word, inchoate, btw.):

Go over the information, the material, the nascent ideas that you have--figure out categories you can sort the information into categories. Each category can form a "topic" in your outline. As you go thru the information a second time, sort the information you have into your outline.

The wonderful thing about the outliner is that it makes it easy to move your categories around--make a subcategory into a category, or a category into a subcategory. Very nice. Very sweet.  ¶ 5:24 PM