Redhaven Outline can create interactive text outlines. This organizational tool can help you arrange text into a hierarchical tree structure. By using this tool to create a skeleton of main topics supported by secondary ideas and details, students and speakers can plan their papers and speeches. As a result, they will be able to write well planned and soundly supported texts.
Its interface is not attractive. In fact, it lacks the visual style that characterizes modern applications. So, it does not benefit from modern controls, such as ribbons. It is divided into two panes: the left pane shows the outline structure in a collapsible view. It features tabs, so you can work on various outline projects at the same time. By right-clicking on a node, you can add a child node or a sibling node. It also supports dragging the nodes to a new location to change their order. However, you should use the keyboard to move them to another level. Although I am not against using the secondary click, which I find particularly useful, I feel that the program really needs standard buttons to perform these actions. Some functions that should be accessed through right-clicking are not clear to the users. Therefore, they will probably find themselves wondering how to use those functions, and eventually they may find out that right-clicking is the answer. Each node can also have a different color to add visual emphasis to your ideas. In addition, you can collapse some nodes and keep only those you are working on, so that you can focus on them better. The right panel, in turn, shows the contents of the active node. In a form-like fashion, you can enter the information required, such as title, keywords, reference, summary and notes. While you can use full formatting for your notes, you are not able to accompany your texts with images and graphs. Once you have finished organizing your outline, you can edit it as a report or export it to a standard text editor.
In general, Redhaven Outline is certainly a useful tool providing several advantages over the traditional pen-and-paper method. However, it can be somewhat difficult to master at first, which may dissuade some users from using it.
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