Use of OmniOutliner for Non-hierarchical Information

[Curtis Clifton]

On Dec 8, 2004, at 12:07 PM, Michael Sauer wrote:

> I wanted to ask people how they use OmniOutliner to represent, 
> process, and think through non-hierarchical information.  What I mean 
> by non-hierarchical information are things that usually are 
> represented as links to other things that lead to reading in a 
> non-linear fashion.

For my dissertation work I have a large OO outline that serves as a 
catch-all for ideas, notes, links to articles to be read, summaries of 
articles, etc.  I have four or five top level items, but under these 
items the notes are essentially flat.  As I find relationships between 
items I rearrange the outline to reflect my new understanding.  For 
this sort of thing it would be nice if OO had cloning, which allows an 
item to appear at multiple points in an outline.  However, I find that 
the design philosophy of OO is a better match for my way of working 
than the other OS X outliners that support cloning, so I've stuck with 
OO.

Another thing that I do in my dissertation notes outline is add an 
second check-box column, called "Discussed".  I use this column to 
track items that I have already discussed with my adviser.  I use the 
main status check box to track items that I have addressed in my 
writing.  Finally, I have a couple of scripts that reformat the outline 
based on the check boxes.  For example, my Highlight for Discussion 
script changes all items that have already been discussed to a light 
grey color, collapses all items where all the children have been 
discussed, and expands all other items.  This reduces my multi-page 
outline to just a page or two of highlights that are easy to take to 
meetings with my adviser.  (I am willing to share these scripts, but I 
haven't yet updated them for OO3.)

Cheers,

Curt

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Curtis Clifton, PhD Candidate
Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cclifton