#Best word processor for writers mac windows#

It’ll zoom off to your outline: either one you’re currently working on, or a fresh draft. When you come across a chunk of text you want to copy, highlight it with your mouse and click the extension button. I’ve experimented with a number of ways to make copying and pasting more efficient, but OutlineEdit’s Marker Safari extension is the best yet. Smartsheet Price: From $10/month per user for 1-2 users Of course, you can also use comments to collaborate with your teammates: Smartsheet also has customizable sharing options, so you can assign different editing privileges to each recipient. Once you add a comment to a row-say, 'Find more info on this,' or 'Not sure if I need this point'-it won’t show up until you click on its speech bubble icon. If you find yourself wishing you could add notes to specific rows without clogging up your outline, you’ll appreciate Smartsheet’s comments feature. That way, you can collapse the sections you’re not working on and focus in on your top priority. Every sub-row can be temporarily hidden, meaning you’ll only see its parent. And there's no limit on how many child rows you can create, so your sub-notes can have sub-notes, and those sub-notes can have sub-notes, and those sub-notes can have sub-notes-you get the gist.īut fear not, even with potentially endless levels of hierarchy, your outline won’t turn into an overwhelming ladder of notes. When you indent a row, it becomes the 'child' of the parent row above it. And Smartsheet takes this one step further by letting you create visual hierarchies. Spreadsheets were literally made for organizing information, which means they’re definitely handy for outlining.

#Best word processor for writers mac windows#

IOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac, Windows, Web per user with Office 365įocusing on one section of an outline at a time Ready to find your new favorite outlining app? Here are the most outstanding options that we found:įree from $6.99/mo. Is there a way to temporarily hide all the other sections? That could mean 'folding' the other sections like an accordion or looking at an individual section in a new window. Tagging: Along similar lines, being able to tag your points with keywords makes it easier to find them again.Įxpand and Collapse Options: Let’s say you want to focus on just one section. And if you can search through all of your outlines at once, it's easier to find everything you've written down. Search: The longer and more detailed an outline is, the handier a search and filter function will be. Look for apps that let you add pop-up or side-bar comments to specific points. Notes: Attaching 'hidden' text to an individual bullet point or line keeps your outline from getting cluttered. Plus, there are a few bonus features that we kept an eye out for: These apps make it easy to drop text into a new place, whether it's via keyboard shortcuts or a drag-and-drop interface. indenting it, outdenting it, moving it to a new place) applies the same change to its children.Īutomatic styling: Having your ideas appear by default with bullets, Roman numerals, numbers, indentation levels, and so forth means you don’t need to waste an extra second inserting the format you need.Įasy rearrangement: Sure, you could rely on the cut-and-paste method to move your sections around, but that would be inefficient and frankly, annoying. Nesting: Along similar lines, these apps let you create 'parent' items, each of which can have an unlimited number of 'children' items. These apps-each in their own way-make it easy to visually distinguish outline sections. Visual hierarchy: If you can’t tell the difference between a big idea and a supporting one, an outline loses a lot of its value.

These are the features we looked for when choosing apps for this roundup: And you don't need anything fancy to build one-a word processor or plain text writing app could do the job.īut first-rate outlining apps handle the organization of your plan, so you can concentrate on the ideas. They're lists of ideas and things you want to work on. Outlines are just bullet points with some extra structure. Here are 20 of the best outlining tools to help you scope out your next post, project, or speech. The best outlining tools make it easy to log your ideas, arrange your arguments, and pull everything together into a polished framework. You map them out hierarchically, so there’s a visual difference between your main points and subsidiary ones.Īnd although you can certainly compose them with good ol’ pen and paper, a specialized app will give you more flexibility to change and reorganize points on the fly. They're the blueprint for what you want to write, say, present, or create. To turn those scattered concepts into a finished product, you're going to need a coherent plan. It doesn't matter how many ideas you have if you can't connect them.