Too little bang for the buck. With the release of OmniFocus, there is a much more focused app for GTD like activity. For brainstorming, the standard version of Mindmanager or even FreeMind are more suitable.

Unfortunately, there are little samples for other purposes, e.g. a meeting agenda, a budget etc. And there is little value in the upgrade from Standard to Pro, other than the voice over or video, which you may not want to put into an outline anyway. It looks a bit as if the developers where not sure themselves what added value to provide in exchange for the money.

OOP is also limited in that the column style is fixed. I have tried this doing meeting protocols. The Who/When/What columns would expand the whole document, even when they were only needed for the last paragraph.

Ok - there's an option in the general preferences to "Automatically create attachments from typed URLs" which turns off hyperlink formatting. But the burden is on the user to search for URL as a synonym for hyperlink.

I wish I hadn't paid for it. Getting presentable output is excruciating. It won't turn off automatic hyperlink formatting. I feel like I'm using Microsoft Word, the way it's trying to second-guess my attempts at formatting. Searching for "hyperlink" in the help messages gives no results -- I can accept poor help files in a free open-source app. but for a commercial product, it's really unacceptable.

Couldn't imagine living without this app!

Despite my complaining about styles below, though, I have to say that using this program has enabled me to clear up some conceptual problems in a book manuscript that I've been working on for several years!

To say styles are "kind of a pain in the ass" (as Zach did below) is an extreme understatement -- they are an utter nightmare. And the "Paste with Current Style" option doesn't work properly -- the pasted line will have the line properties of the current style but any text attributes will still be those of the source -- which means lots of wasted time reformatting if you're moving an outline in from another program.

It's great. What it does, it is the best.

I think that OOP is the list maker bar none. It is the best tool out there for structured hierarchical outlines and the preparation of documents.

That said, I think that if they followed KIT or Yojimbo or Mori or DevonThink and their 'gathering and collection' abilities it would be a mistake for Omni.

OOP prepares documents.

The others do databases, either analysable like devon, or loose like VoodooPad. But you wouldn't reach for any of them, maybe Mori, if you wanted to prepare a document.

I use it for school projects and my teachers are very impressed :)
Thanks OmniGroup for this great software.

Most of my thesis is currently contained in OmniOutliner... LOVE!

One of my favorite things about being a mac user is this program. Here's why:

I use the kGTD system to organize my life (www.kinkless.com), which requires OOP. Well worth the product price alone. I've also used it to help with the creative process of... pretty much any project, by asking myself a series of increasingly specific questions in the header and flushing out the details in the subheaders. I imagine, for those familiar with the snowflake method of narrative development, this program could be used to achieve that end.

It's the most useful thing on the planet when it comes to notetaking. I used to take notes in Microsoft Word, which does have auto-numbering capabilities for different levels of indentation when it recognizes that you're writing an outline; but its outline features are pretty severely limited beyond that, since you're confined to Word's environment.

You are able to expand and collapse any heading or subheading, which makes things considerably easier on the eyes. In my class notes, I'll often pose a heading as a question, and give an increasingly detailed answer through a series of nested subheadings and further questions... which makes studying fairly easy.

You can paste images (which are, themselves, collapsable) directly into the notes. Pretty damn helpful when it comes to describing mechanisms and anatomy in neuroscience (I'm much more of a visual guy)

I'm experimenting with the style formatting features right now. In my neuroscience info, for instance, important notes have a red-tinted background, anatomy info has a green background, mechanism info has a blue background, and helpful notes to aid my understanding have an orange background. Be warned, though, styles are kind of a pain in the ass with OOP.

I haven't tried taking notes on the fly in class with it yet, but I suspect it would work pretty well for people who lug their laptops around with them. There's a feature that allows you to record sound directly to an outline... I guess that might be helpful for lecture notes, disk space pending.

I'd like to see better indexing and linkback functionality (a la voodoo pad) and maybe an area to drop auxilary media / documents / web archives (devonthink); and, as I said, creating and using styles is not the most intuitive. but, for what it is, this program is pretty solid.

4.5/5