Reviews of OneNote vs. other outliners

Posted by Jack Crawford
Jul 25, 2012 at 12:51 AM

Like others here I’m really enjoying Steve Z’s series of reviews. Thanks Steve for taking the time. It is much appreciated.

Some random observations follow:

I wonder whether the high rating of OneNote in other forums is because they are using a broader definition of “outliner” than we would use here. I suspect many people would call any software with a tree pane or note tabs outlining software. As it happens, I have been a satisfied user of OneNote since its launch. It is particularly effective for organising data, but I wouldn’t use it if I wanted to outline ideas in a detailed structure.

I have had a licence for Inspiration for longer than I care to remember, but find it a very frustrating program. The UI and I have never got along and I am constantly feeling that I am fighting againt it. It is not as intuitive as it should be for an educational app. The other problem is its looks. Fonts are not presented in the outline at the correct size (at least 2 points below what it says at the bottom of the screen). When I asked Inspiration about this some time back, they acknowledged that it was an issue and was a hangover from porting the software from the Mac version. I would not be as generous as Steve was in his scoring of Ease of Use.

Conversely, I would rate the bonus feature in Inspiration of diagrammatic representations more highly. Unless you go into the likes of MindManager, Inspiration is the only software that I can recall that allows you to toggle on the fly between a text based and graphical outline. That’s close to a killer feature in my book.

I’m particularly interested in the assessment of Noteliner which is coming up next.

Jack