Natara Bonsai - still a top notch outliner

Posted by Dr Andus
Jul 25, 2012 at 01:16 AM

Let me repost my reply to Steve here as well, as he has kindly agreed to include Bonsai in his review series:

http://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/onenote-smack-down-iii-bonsai/

Hi Steve, thank you for including Bonsai in your review series. As a Bonsai fan, I’m obviously going to disagree with your overall verdict (especially the comparison with UV Outliner. If you have Bonsai set up properly and are familiar with its features, it’s far quicker and easier to outline than in UVO in my experience).

However, you’ve confirmed some of my suspicions about why Bonsai is not better known and more widely used as an outliner. The problem seems to be that when it is first installed, all the task management bells and whistles that are turned on distract from its underlying functionality as an outliner. Moreover, the controls to these features are in 3 different places: Global Settings, Preferences, and scattered around the various pull-down menus. It took me a few years of using the software (for a while in conjunction with the Palm app companion) to learn how to turn unneeded features off and turn useful ones on. E.g. I can see you still have Dates, Filters, and Views footers turned on in the screenshot, which end up crowding the interface (but they can be turned off under View > Toolbars).

Not sure what you mean by “level-by-level” text styles (it can’t do different font styles for each level, although it can have different font colour per level), but the overall outline font and the notes font and font style can be changed under Global Settings.

Regarding the export problem into Word, there is a work around. It is possible to export into text, copy and paste into Word, and then turn on the bullets function, which puts the items back into their original hierarchy.

As for visual indication of notes in the outline, there is such a thing. Right-click on the outline header, select “Edit View,” and add “Note” to the displayed columns. This adds a column that displays a little note icon besides each item that has a note.

I agree that Bonsai is unwieldy out of the box. However, I would suggest that spending some time to figure out all the little features rewards the user in the end, as Bonsai is an accomplished outliner for big outlining jobs, once it’s set up for the specific task at hand. However, for quick outlining jobs even I prefer Noteliner these days.