OmniOutliner 5
For whether you’re writing a novel or a shopping list. ESSENTIAL, $14.99; PRO, $89.99 | OMNIGROUP.COM
OmniOutliner 5 marks the debut of a brand new edition of the Omni Group’s venerable outlining tool: Essentials. Priced at only $15, the simplest way to describe Essentials would be as a cutdown version of its sibling, OmniOutliner Pro. But that would be to do it a disservice, as Essentials is a very capable outlining tool in its own right.
Its developer describes Essentials using words like ‘minimal’ and ‘focused’, so you know exactly what to expect — a clean, clutter-free interface and pretty text. There are multiple themes to choose from, each of which specifies things like font and background colour — with a dark mode, too. There are some new features that are common to both Essentials and Pro: live statistics, which tell you how many rows, words and characters you’ve typed, for example. Support for the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar is also common to both.
Essentials reads and writes the same file format as Pro, so there’s no problem if you want to move to that version later. Speaking of file formats, the iOS version has been upgraded to support this format, too. While Essentials is great for getting started and for most outlining tasks, Pro takes things a step further by allowing you to edit themes and modify the style of individual elements within them. For example, you could change the shading colour on Level 2 rows only, or the text style of Level 1 entries. Pro’s real power, though, lies in its ability to manipulate data.
You can add columns and specify that the data is numerical. It can then be formatted as currency — governed by your choice of region in System Preferences.
For indented rows that contain a column full of numbers, their parent row displays a total above that column. This also works for durations, providing you with a simple way of tracking costs or time allocated.
Pro also enables you to save searches as filters so you can easily focus when you need to. The all-important keyboard shortcuts can be customised, and documents can be encrypted, too. Accessing all these tools can be tricky, and when you find them, they don’t always work as expected. However, that is our only criticism of an excellent tool that goes beyond traditional outliners.
OmniOutliner 5 is an excellent upgrade to what was already the premier outlining tool on the Mac, and is ideal for making lists, brainstorming, planning a book and so much more.