outlining-like features within cells of a table

Posted by nathanb
Oct 24, 2018 at 07:20 PM

I have a love-hate relationship with OneNote and share your opinion that it’s too unstructured, but it’s table features are one of it’s core things I’ve always liked. They of course aren’t ‘smart’ containers, where you can perform math, sort, and filter functions (Notion.so for that) but it’s really flexible for grouping and nesting stuff. For me, it’s the king of ‘dumb-2d-gridding’.

Examples:
-I have thousands of 2-cell ‘tables’ scattered throughout my notes and their usual purpose is one cell to describe and the other to contain content. Usually links, attachments, and screenshots.
-OneNote is a pretty good ‘folding outliner’... and you can fold a lot of stuff into an outline, including tables (which themselves can contain all sorts of good stuff)!
-I almost always drop rich content (anything non-text) into tables as it gives me a lot more control with annotating and arranging. A good example is a group of photos for a project. Strangely, it won’t just attach a photo as a file icon, it insists on showing the whole photo. Normally this takes up way too much space. But you can shrink and expand photos by grabbing the corners. So a really good way to keep a group of related photos within a page is within a table cells. Just keep them all ‘shrinked’ to thumnail-size and expand on-demand. The table just flexes with no fuss but still maintains the array structure.
-You can nest tables within tables. Out of curiosity I tried to see how deep I can nest and became board after 8. I’ve never really pushed OneNote’s ‘infinite canvas’ concept but now I’m wondering how usable an enormous nested grid would be.

The one thing it seems to not be able to do is to contain collapsible outlines within table cells. You can outline there, just can’t fold the nodes.

I’ve been closely watching the development of the new OneNote app, and it would appear that custom tagging is FINALLY arriving to the Universal version, so for the first time in several years I’m hopeful that I might not need to abandon it as my main junk drawer. The way OneNote does IN-LINE content tagging is pretty rare and can be very powerful. It can really enhance long-form content within a page and can adds a dimension to outlining that most tools can’t. The vast majority of note-takers apply metadata at the page/note level, not the paragraph/sentence level. That leads to different approaches. Yeah it’s easy to bury content within OneNote due to it’s lack of global metadata features, so it’s not my home for everything. But it’s options for arranging a ton of mixed content on a canvas is unmatched, I think. But it does require a different workflow than most alternatives, and I’m finding that comes with it’s own ‘lock in’ effect since it’s hard for me to get used to more granular tools that are technically better.

Assuming you knew all that and it still falls short…. I’d take a hard look at Notion.so. That’s a very exciting beast. It’s a wonderful combo of content nesting, 2d layouts, and database. The more I mess with it, the more I’m blown away by the posibilities. Once you get a feel for it, you can basically design your own custom platform. Now instead of searching for software that does X, my first instinct is to see if I can get Notion to do X. Usually it can.

ndodge wrote:
Hello, I thought I’d resurrect this question again, regarding whether
>there is something that allows you to have separate mini outlines within
>cells of a table. The items mentioned above just didn’t cut it for me.
>OneNote is too unstructured and lacking of features, compared to Word,
>for example, as far as working with tables.
> >Thank you,
>Nathan