Outline: Knowledge Organizer App Reviews

Very happy to download given that I was a heavy OneNote user until I moved all my pcs to Mac….used it once, then tried to open a notebook, it crashed…and now there is nothing to do to restart the app…it is a viewer only. Do not pay 19$ for this, give 10 to charity and move on instead - you will feel a lot better than i do now…;)

I think this version is way better than the previous one. Although there are some minor bugs here and there, but it is still pretty good specially that now I have the editor. Thanks a lot!

This is my first review ever and had to leave some feedback. I am so happy with this application. I tried so many other knock offs and even bought the exspensive circus ponies version. This is by far superior. The cosmetics, button layout and functionality is just like Microsoft Onenote. Even better, it can open/use microsoft onenote files! OMG this app made my day. Although this vendor pushes the use for Microsoft Skydrive for cloud storage, you have the option to save your notebook file where ever you want. ie. Dropbox folder or your local drive. The other major competitor converts screen caps into massive tiff with no options to reduce size other than manual import. The competitor has limited ability to drag and freely move whatever you put on the page. Outline does it all. I don’t have to open some dumb java looking inspector. Sorry if my words are a bit harsh to Circus Ponies (the competitor to this app) but I bought their software for their crazy price and was so dissapointed. For me, Outline is worth it’s weight in gold and even replaces my wiki’s. I am not sure why people would give this a 1 rating. Perhaps they don’t understand what OneNote is. Thanks guys!

I’ve been waiting for this app for a year so I’m glad it’s here and it works. Some issues I’m still having that I hope get resolved soon - I’ve been using onenote across multiple devices for 5 years now, and haven’t had sync issues until now. I’m using skydrive. And I’ve had several issues with syncing that have forced onenote to repair a new copy of a section. It’s hard to tell what changes made it across when this happens. - I can’t make the tabs/folders disappear or minimized on the left. Being able to switch it to the right to be consistent with onenote for windows would be nice as well. - Sometimes the app loads up with no pages showing at all - the unreliability makes me want to switch back to apple notes and causes notes to be fragmented again. - copy and paste from other app like microsoft word can show up funky. I’m glad outline is here and functioning though. I’m really looking forward to continued developments/refinements on this!

This is a great looking app for note-taking, but is missing some important features - spell check, different views, automatic capitalization… etc. As a college student, this app has replaced running oneonte via virtualization for me.

Layout is great and exactly what I was looking for. More advanced features such as spell check would be nice. It syncs only with cloud type services, the iTunes sync does not work. Biggest problem is that it crashes frequently with loss of data. Money down the drain as far as I am concerned.

All my previous OneNote notes are now on my iMac and my MacbookPro and with SkyDrive I can see them on my iPhone. The program is great it still has a few things missing to be fully OneNote but I am not complaining, Good Job!

I’ve only used this program for a matter of a week and have had all my notebooks corrupted. More than a few times. I’m lucky enough to have a great backup system, otherwise all my skydrive notebooks would have been destroyed beyond OneNote completely. The notebooks still work with Outline, just not with SkyDrive or OneNote anymore. While the Outline interface is beautiful and I love how close they are coming to this solution, I work in a PC/MAC environment and require the interoperability between the 2. I’ve had to purchase Parrells and OneNote 2013 and go with that solution instead, for the time being. Devs, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m rooting for ya, but get the sync issues fixed quick. There’s a lot of people who don’t back up everything so frequent. They’re not going to be happy having all their data “converted” to a format only compatible with your program moving forward. As a side note, not ALL of your notebook gets converted in a way that MS OneNote finds is “corrupted”, but specific sections that you work on. Sections you don’t touch in Outline seem to still work in OneNote. Yes. I’ve sent am e-mail to you guys in regards to this and haven’t heard back. Fix the issue and I’ll remove this comment.

I was hoping this would be what I was looking for - a way of keeping my OneNote notebooks when I migrated back to a Mac. It’s close. It looks very nice, and I was able to open the notebooks stored locally on my Mac. But here’s what it does badly: 1. It is incredibly buggy. - About 20% of the time, I lose all of my recently notes I added after closing a notebook - It adds or deletes characters, or the cursor winds up out of register with the point it’s actually adding characters - When I have multiple text boxes, clicking on one of them will often put the cursor in a different box - It has been crashing lately, requiring a forced quit. 2. The features really aren’t there yet - I can no longer access any of my shared team notebooks that reside on a server - There is no way to add tables that I have seen - The user manual is either terrible (extremely basic) or hidden. - There sidebar takes up about 25 % of the screen, with no way to minimize it. I will keep using this until the next update to give it a chance, but if it doesn’t improve soon, I will bite the bullet and re-type all of my notes into Evernote or something similar.

Here’s what is AWESOME about it: -looks and feels like Onenote. Many of the same features -love the “export as pdf” feature. very handy Here’s what needs fixing: -sync errors: lots of them. Synced the first time to my skydrive notebooks, but now is continually giving me “sync errors” -crashing: this happens at least once a day, sometimes with data loss. unacceptable. -data loss: when these sync errors or crashes happen, sometimes I lose my data. I have decided to use the Onenote web app until this is fixed so I know for sure my notes will save. I can’t afford to lose my notes!! -Can’t insert tables: I don’t see anywhere that I can insert a table. In Onenote and on their web app, you just hit “tab” after a word and it will insert a table. Would love it if that could be added, or even a drop down menu to add tables -Can’t choose style of bullet points -side bar is huge: no way to minimize it -problems selecting things: sometimes I try to select one thing and it will select others I don’t want Has lots of potential to be great! I wouldn’t even mind if it didn’t sync to onenote (so it could just be a stand alone notes program), but it would have to be much more reliable (ie no crashing/data loss!) for that to happen. Hopefully these will be fixed SOON (as in not having to wait a year for an update, like with the last release!). Until then, I don’t think I’ll be using it.

If I had never used MS OneNote I would think this is an OK app and I would have not have understood what its purpose really is. I use OneNote all day at work, on my PC. I am married to OneNote and Excel to get my work done. But, I cant stand Windows, so I was excited to use this app at home on my Mac. It simply can NOT compare. So many features are missing, so many. •Also, tables created in OneNote are locked (completely). •Objects embedded via OneNote are locked, but can be opened, BUT if saved the changes arent saved (so thats pointless). •Cannot hold Command nor Option when arrow-key-selecting text (massive time saver). •Cannot drag an email from Mail into a note (you CAN in OneNote, which is one of the most important features that I use). •Cannot put the Pages list on the right of the note. •OneNote uses the Ribbon bar at the top, but the Outline version of that is barron - naked! So few controls, and theyre not labelled well. •No visible way to make a reminder or create a task - thats important for following up on work. •Right clicking on content is useless because the menu is empty (except for copy/paste) •Links created in OneNote arent clickable. •Text colour options limited to only 12. •Adding attachments is a weak feature and doesnt work like the rest of the Mac OS experience. I just dragged a .rtfd into it and it crashed. •The small Delete key does not delete characters to the right of the cursor. Instead it throws an error sound. Why would someone remove that ability? Thats standard stuff. •Typically, when typing in any other Mac app, you can hold OPTION and press the LEFT or RIGHT arrive keys to jump entire words (cursor insertion). In Outline this jumps through the history (I think). Thats fine, however for some reason an entire paragraph of newly typed text was lost! I immediately checked OneNote on a nearby PC and found that it had no syncd the data. The more I use this program the more hope is lost in it ever getting close to par. I wasted my money and I would gladly give the app back in exchange for my payment.

I like the software in general but one big flaw is the lack of a spell check feature. If I would have known this I wouldn’t have bought the software. Which is sh$ty because it interfaces onenote files well.

Beautiful app, works great easy to use, but lack Spellcheck. I find I that I have to constantly be retyping a lot of things that could be fixed with autocorrent/spellcheck.

I think this .App is a disaster. The good things about it: It is beautiful looking. The bad things about Outline: file corruption. File corruption. File corruption. My main onenote book is ~ 200 Mb. I frequently import screenshots and annotate relevant/interesting items. Upon import of said notebooks into Outline my Windows OneNote books failed to open. Let me be clear that I never had a corrupted OneNote notebook in 6 years of using OneNote 2007, 2010 and 2013. Not a one. As soon as I purchased Outine, my problems with corruption started. As soon as I stopped using Outline my corruption problems disappeared. While this is not proof positive it is good evidence that Outline corrupted my notebooks. I spent $40 on an .App that required an additional 8 hours of hunting through 200 Mb notebooks at the OneNote website for corrupt pages. At best I would say this software is, as sold, in the alpha stage of development. Be warned. Notebook corruption and frustration lay ahead.

I’m a brand new user to Outline, after organizing my entire work life with MS OneNote. My first impressions: 1 - The interface is well done ice. The layout is easy to use and understand. If you’re a OneNote user there is no learning curve. 2 - It appears to sync very well with .one files saved in Dropbox, which is the reason I purchased it, and why I gave it 4 stars. 3 - It’s has very basic features. Too basic. I can live without “bells and whistles,” like as having a menu option for inserting screen clippings easily. I can even live without being able to insert hyperlinks. However: You can’t create a basic table. Outline can view and edit the TEXT within a table that was created in OneNote, but you can’t make a new one. You can’t even copy and paste a table from a previously created OneNote page. The formatting doesn’t copy. That’s a pretty fundamental item to be missing, and I sincerely hope the developpers add it ASAP. 4 - If I did not need to share notebooks with MSOneNote, I don’t think the features in Outline would be worth paying $20 for (at 50% off).

The program is supposed to be the Mac equivalent of Microsoft’s OneNote which is absolutely fantastic for students because they can keep their notes in the same place. One thing someone sidestepping platforms (from Windows to Mac) will notice is that there is no spell checker and the find command will not automatically take the user to the page a specific word/phrase is on (among other shortcomings). At first I accepted these as growing pains before the program’s bugs made it painfully clear that I was not growing but shrinking. The first major glitch came when I tried to import my OneNote files into Outline and the progam crashed continually. When I was able to bring them up I couldn’t modify their content or work from them (and crashes were epidemic), so the notion that this program will accept all the content of your OneNote book is entirely false (which is a shame because I had 3 years of notes that I occasionally found extremely helpful). Another major concern is that on 2 occasions I seem to have had notes go missing, which is a major concern because I can’t afford to pour myself into note-taking (which is earning me As at university) if they are suddenly going to disappear. Other glitches simply make the program unpleasant to use, such as the way bulleting an existing sentence that is at the side of the page places your cursor 2 letters into the sentence, meaning that if you want to indent once more you have to scoll back 2 letter spaces to do so. Another glitch is that when cutting and pasting existing notes, often the content will not paste (especially if you are cutting and pasting bullet points). I find that I am constantly pasting notes into Pages in order to transfer them from one place in Outline to another. Moreover, when you cut a note out of the program and then want to undo your mistake the program sometimes loses the information (so no cutting - use copy and then go back and delete because once it’s gone the thing saves automatically and you’ll have to redo the notes). Bolding text is also problematic because once you have bolded a line the cursor will automatically return to bold even once you’ve set it to regular font, meaning that if I want to unbold a line and then add to it, the font I type in will become bolded after the first letter typed and force you to bold/unbold the desired text after you’ve finished typing (same with italics I’m pretty sure). The switch from PC to Mac hasn’t been as difficult for me because I was raised by a Jobs look-alike (no really they even look similar), but given that school was my main focus I now regret the shift. You think that Mac, whose student demographic has exploded (you shoud see the number of MacBooks in my lectures), would take on a program like this itself (and make sure that people sidestepping platforms are accomodated), but having left it to Gorillized Corporation has proven a mistake. Jobs said it himself: it’s “about software,” and Mac should ensure that the core programs developed by Microsoft are available and working well (I mean, Microsoft developed both an OS and OneNote- Mac should do the same).

The new update truely makes this app great. They added much needed pdf print out support, full screen pages, and word processing capabilities.

It’s a very well designed app, but there as been for the longest time a BIG PROBLEM that has never been fixed : you can’t sync with OneDrive, each time you have the same message : Login Failed. The company is aware of the problem and always promise to fix it through a new update but update after update, the problem persists.

Well designed, both visually and functionally, this is simply the best notetaking app for Mac. Where Microsoft’s own OneNote app is garish and crude, Outline is elegant, mature and calm. Outline is, of course, derived of Microsoft’s OneNote, it ties in perfectly to that ecosystem, but Outline also lets you store your notebooks locally on your Mac or on Dropbox or Box. As with OneNote, Outline offers a comprehensive structural system consisting of notebook, sections, sub-sections and pages which you can make as complex of simple as you like. If you’re looking for a truly great notetaking app for Mac, you’ve found it. Outline is everything you want and more.

I was looking for an app that allows one to visualise a complex hierarchy of files, and link pages between them, while writing, and Outline does a beautiful job of that. I also appreciate the live wordcount feature at the bottom of the page, and the ability to color code files. The greatest attraction, though, I have to say, is the interface. It makes the original OneNote look like Gollum. For short stories and blog articles, I’ve completely moved camp from Scrivener to Outline, and have been far more productive since; now, Scrivener is a *beast* and still invaluable for big, complex projects, don’t get me wrong, but Outline just has a light, fun, yet professional vibe to it, and personally, just makes me happy to open up and start working. Features I’d looove to see in future upgrades: the ability to change fonts and the default format presets and, one feature I’ve longed to see in OneNote for years as well: the ability to style individual text boxes (ex. bg colour & outline), to make them stand out (and save presets for those too), as well as linking text boxes visually with angular arrows and envelopping clouds or "magnetic backgrounds”. That would definitely put it at an advantage over OneNote :P I did experience the occasional synching slowdown/error between Outline and OneNote/SkyDrive too, but nothing tragic yet, and nothing that wasn’t fixed by a re-click of the sync button. Since this is not an important feature for me, personally, I did not remove a star, though I’ve stopped the sync process altogether. I just use Dropbox. As far as the version I’m currently rating (3.5.1), spellcheck, hyperlinks, full-screen and tables (I’m gleaming over a few discontent reviews below here) are all available :)