Pivot tables for outlines

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Posted by Chris Thompson
Jun 13, 2006 at 01:44 AM

I’ve tried most outliners over the years and just stumbled across one today that has a feature I haven’t seen before. The designer calls it “reassociation”, but It’s a lot like Excel’s pivot tables. Basically, you select one or more columns to collect by, and it reorganizes the structure of your outline based on those column’s values. In a GTD-style workflow, you could use this feature to switch between an outline view ordered/organized by project to a view ordered by context.

There are a couple screenshots illustrating this here (ignore the first one):
http://homepage.mac.com/sebastian.krauss/mymindscreenshots/

I really like this feature. Are there any other outliners that let you do this? It’s possible to simulate it in Ecco by creating a new notepad keyed on the columns you want then applying a sort, producing the same linear list (assuming no context parents) but without the outline organization. That’s the closest I can think of.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 13, 2006 at 12:41 PM

I believe the now-defunct program Skwyrul had this pivot function… It was a free program and someone recently uploaded the file to the Zoot Yahoo forum (I think it was the Zoot forum—maybe it was the Outliners-PIM forum).

Steve Z.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 13, 2006 at 12:45 PM

Oops. My bad. It was the outliners-PIM forum where the Skwyrul installation program is uploaded.

Steve Z.

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