Outline: Knowledge Organizer App Reviews

Occasionally Outline (Ver 3.2) would crash after I pasted text into a page — an annoyance, but worth it as I found the organization tools of the program useful. So after I pasted 15 or so lines from an email and it crashed I was not concerned. Upon restarting I discovered that all the pages in that section of the notebook — several weeks of work — were gone. Data loss is usually considered unacceptable in the computer field. This kind of unexpected behavior makes this program useless for me. Don’t put anything in this program that you wouldn’t mind losing!

This app is amazing, and has come a long way!! LOVE IT. And for the love of all productivity, PLEASE get an iPhone app.

From the first time I saw this app on the app store I liked the interface and started using it. There were some sporadic problems with the program at some points associated with me updating to a new iOS and Mac OS, but since then, they have been fixed and the program now runs smoothly and I have not had a repeat of those problems. There are other features I would like to see in the next upgrades, however, the way it is, I have to say that this is one of the strongest note taking apps I have used. I no longer use OneNote, but I now use Outline entirely and sync it across my desktop system only to several drives for secure backups of all my data. I did have problems with OneDrive and uploading large file sizes, so I had to divide my school files between my hardrive and OneDrive, but since Outline allows me to keep all my data together, I opted for not using OneDrive for syncing files. I do it all on my desktop with multiple redundant drives. My interaction with Outline support has been excellent. They are eager to respond to my problems, or questions, and are prompt to do respond to my emails. I can only say that as of now this is a great app.

I have been working on a presentation for six months using "outline" and it crashed. Each time it opens it closes. I have no access to the notes, drafts etc that I accumulated through long hours of research. What am I to do?

A tabbed freeform notebook. OUTLINE has worked out nicely. There was a small problem with the early version 2 release, but it was a simple fix to remedy crashes. This is a good application which had some spare beginnings & the developers have delivered on their promises to flesh it out! Being able to port OneNote databases into Outline is good. OneNote is one of Microsoft’s better apps. The sections & section groups translate well, though they don’t reside exactly the same as in Microsoft OneNote & that was baffling for a moment. Even as a standalone app, this is a good place to track (for example) Engineering Projects & various project notes into discrete & organized notebooks. Outline is still much cleaner and usable than the current Mac port of OneNote, imo. Outline is easy to look at & work with. Gorillized developers don’t seem to just be chasing Microsoft as the features here I feel significantly surpass that application at this time. There are now several apps knocking with similar feature sets, but this is among the better ones, if that’s your path. There is a test drive available. The price of Outiline is however, a bit of concern to me, but it does what it claims to do & functionality is going to be the driving measure, if you have to work with OneNote files.

I have been looking on and off for a note taking and management software to replace evernote. Evernote has great syncing and searching fuctions but the actual formatting and capability of the notes section is limiting and clunky to me. Some things I like - I get to pick how the data is stored and synced - Great iPad app - Works great with dropbox - Free form notes and images while giving plenty of structure options - Notebook hierarchy note structure Some things I wish I could do - Table of contents based on headers - beter internote refernces/links - image text searching - basic diagraming capability and/or annotations One things I unforutnatley had to do once is recorver from a crash that caused a corrupted notebook. Luckily I was using dropbox and I was easily able to go back in a version with no loss of data.

Love it. Use it instead of a paper lab book and its perfect.

Lacking a version of OneNote that would run on OS 10.8.x, I looked to Outline to fill the gap. It does read OneNote note files reasonably well, but the application is slow and lacks much of the user-friendly interface of the Windows OneNote found in Office 2010. The menus in Outline are bare bones and none of the expected right-click functionality or menu customization found in OneNote seems to exist in Outline. Its an OK $9.99 App for which they charge $39.99 … there is the rub; for $40, I expect a commercial piece of software, not a what appears to be a beta version that looks like it could have been bundled with OS 10.2. The final straw is that there is no version of the Outline iOS app available that will work with the first generation iPad. Why require iOS 7.0 or later when the capability of the App would make it at home in iOS 3 ? Bottom-line, Outline is not completely awful, but it is neither worth the $40 price of entry.

I’ve spent a lot of money on various software products looking the application which balances the ability to logically organize volumes of notes and embed documents directly in the documents. Outline has allowed me to aggregate and organize related contracts, presentations, maps, photos, and other related documents and embed them in my notes. Keep up the great work. I appreciate the effort that has gone into developing this product.

Doesn’t connect with OneDrive.

I so want to like this app. If it were as function as it is beautiful, it would really be something. Alas, that is not the case. I bought this at v1. It has been struggling ever since. Today I gave up. I had only one new Notebook open but when I went went to rename a section it choked and froze. (MacBook Air, 8 Gigs RAM, 2+ Gigs Free memory). Maybe someday Outline will fulfill its promise. Meantime, I am using Curio. Its Mac-only, but it works.

This update fixed the outline syncing problem! I have it on Mac and iPad and when I type something on one, press the sync button and press the sync button on the other device it’s there. Perfect!! I’m a student and use it for taking notes it’s THE best notebook out there. Looks beautiful and is very practical as well. Keep the updates coming whenever problem pop up and I will be a happy customer and keep suggesting it to other students i meet :) The only negative thing I have to say is that there’s no iPhone version, even though they’ve been saying on forums for years that they’re working on one. Come out with a solid iPhone app and this gets an EASY 5 stars!

It won’t sync to onedrive at all. Signed out - signed in to no avail. The app is empty.

This is some beautiful amazing software that is plagued with bugs. It RUINED my OneNote notebooks by inserting random characters all over my notes (changed letters to numbers and to copyright characters, etc.) It’s beautiful though. I wish it worked better, specially if they are charging me $15 bucks. With so many bugs I cant believe it’s version 3.41.

OK, right up front, let’s be clear about why I use Outline and like it a lot- It’s a “work-a-like” for Microsoft One Note, and matches key featuers and functionality while giving adiditional options for how you sync it to other devices. I have MS One Note but rarely use it anymore. I DON’T use Outline to open and work with One Note files, so I can’t comment on compatibility. Working with it’s own files and native file mode, I have not had any issues or problems. I use this extensively for my work (I’m an engineer) and for many kinds of peronal projects, too. I the interface and ways for organizing projects to work very well, importing graphics or complete PDF’s has some nice options (I prefer the mult-page mode, as it allows me to jump around between pages. Clean, classy, and productive. I like Outline a lot.

The app is not opening for me, unfortunately I am not able to use it since its latest update.

I just lost an entire tab of notes in Outline. I was re-organizing my tabs when Outline “failed” a sync. Now, almost every document under the tab I was working is gone. The title is still there, but there’s no content just the “broken document” icon. When I went to look in One Note, it said that the document was unavailable because of a sync issue. This app is a pig in lipstick. Stay away if you don’t want to lose data.

This app has come a long way and for $15 is a steal. App-integrated zoom features would be a big plus, but it’s now replaced OneNote for my purposes. Good job.

Please dont use this app. One Note is much better. I lost couple of my notes due to outline and its sync issues. Some of it were very critical for a presentation. Also you cannot copy tables from excel or other area and paste it here. It completely breaks the formats of the tables.

The app offers eveything you might expect from a note app. There is no need to pay for additional features or subscriptions.Bad it doesn’t support formulas and calculating but anyway I’m happy with its performance.