A useful property of 2-pane PIMs

Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 21, 2008 at 09:37 PM

The main program I had in mind there was OmniOutliner Pro and its “sections” pane. One especially nice feature of its implementation is that you control how deep the list of major headings to display, and the depth of displayed headings in that view can be set differently for different parts of your outline.

For example, I keep both my shopping list and my list of recipes in the same outline file, under two headings (shopping and recipes). The shopping heading has subheadings (grocery, household, etc.) but I just keep a flat list of recipes under the recipes heading. I have OmniOutliner set up to display both the headings and subheadings for the shopping list but only the headings for the recipe section. Basically I just want to be able to jump around to what I think are major sections. I keep recipes and the shopping list in the same file so that I can generate a single printout quickly to take to the store (filtering the whole document by unchecked item).

TAO (the Mac software, unrelated to “TAO Notes”) also has this kind of feature. You can kind of simulate it in Ecco.

—Chris

Jiggernaut wrote:
> >The third approaches that Chris delineates (single pane outliners with an adjunct
>view showing major headings/topics) is exactly what I have been searching for, with
>no success, for quite some time. Word 2003 has this in a way with the “Document Map”
>pane, but I it lacking in many regards.
> >Does anyone now of a program that will allow
>you to do what Chris describes: essentially a flat-out line as the main pane and a
>second pain that automatically creates a table of contents/heading list on the other
>pane so that you can quickly jump from heading to heading within the outline?