OmniOutliner is commercial outlining software for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

produced by

The Omni Group The Omni Group is an American software company that develops software for the macOS, iOS, and watchOS platforms. The Omni Group was informally founded as a NEXTSTEP consulting company in 1989 by Wil Shipley, who immediately brought on Ken Case ...

. OmniOutliner has most of the features of a conventional outliner, allowing the user to create nested lists of topics for almost any purpose, but has additional features extending its functionality beyond simple outlining. Recent versions of the software are universal binaries. OmniOutliner received a special mention in the 2005

Apple Design Awards The Apple Design Awards (ADAs) is an event hosted by Apple Inc. at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The purpose of the event is to recognize the best and most innovative Macintosh and iOS software and hardware produced by independent d ...

, and Macworld gave the "Professional" version its highest rating.

History

OmniOutliner 4 for Mac was released on January 15, 2014, with a modern redesign with new sidebars and a dynamic inspector, text zooming, smart match, date pasting logic, and more. OmniOutliner 4.5 for Mac was released on March 2, 2016, a major update with more control printing selected rows, filtering indentation, export with tab separated indentation, and more. OmniOutliner 5 for Mac was released on April 5, 2017. OmniOutliner 3 for iOS was released in 2018.

Feature set

Outlining

OmniOutliner provides the basic functions of an outliner, structuring content in a hierarchy of rows indented under one another to show the relationships between different items. The user can expand or collapse outline levels for easy viewing, sort topics, promote or demote the level of a topic, or "hoist" one level so only that topic is shown. It supports considerable control over styles, allowing the user to make global changes to the appearance of the outline at particular level. It also permits the user to add notes to any row, which can be displayed in-line, (i.e. within the structure of the outline) or in a separate pane below the outline. OmniOutliner documents can incorporate multimedia elements, including images, audio, and video, as well as PDF documents and web links. In addition, OmniOutliner allows the addition of columns to the outline, so that the user can create rudimentary spreadsheets. There is limited support for summarizing columns, such as totaling or averaging, albeit not with anything close to the variety of functions provided in conventional spreadsheet software such as

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro (comp ...

. OmniOutliner does not support cloning, a feature of some outliners that allows one topic to appear at more than one place in the outline. The Omni Group may, however, add this feature sometime in the future.

Extensibility

OmniOutliner supports scripting via

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

, and users have extended the software to export to

iCal Calendar is a personal calendar app made by Apple Inc. that runs on both the macOS desktop operating system and the iOS mobile operating system. It offers online cloud backup of calendars using Apple's iCloud service, or can synchronize with ...

, Apple's calendaring software, and even the

iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...

Import and export

OmniOutliner's document format is proprietary, but it can export to

OPML OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines (defined as "a tree, where each node contains a set of named attributes with string values"). Originally developed by UserLand as a native file format for the outliner appli ...

, HTML, DOCX, and several text and rich text formats. It can import from several other document formats (ACTA, MORE, Keynote, and Concurrence), as well as text and rich text formats.

References

{{reflist O MacOS-only software Outliners IOS software IPadOS software