Tom Gorham
Pages now has an outlining feature, which is fantastic news, but you shouldn’t ditch your old outlining tools just yet, as it has a couple of flaws…
Much of the annoyance value of a saying such as ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ probably comes from the fact that, as with all similarly irritating aphorisms, there’s a lot of truth in it. Producing something worthwhile – in whatever creative field you work – is easier and invariably significantly more rewarding if you organise your thoughts beforehand.
Which is why I was delighted when Apple’s Pages belatedly joined Microsoft Word in adding an outline feature. At its best, an outline is indispensable to the creative planning process. It acts like a map of a maze: following the re-organised logic within it saves a lot of creative dead ends later
At last, I thought, I could give up the plethora of outlining tools with which I’ve dabbled over the past couple of years, from OmniOutliner (omnigroup.com) and NoteTaker (aquaminds.com) via a short dalliance with Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com) and outline within the application in which I do most of my creative work. But it turns out there are a few flaws holding back Pages’ implementation.
First, feature count. Pages’ outline feature is well implemented and easy to use – more intuitive, certainly, than the parallel feature in Microsoft Word. You can get started quickly through a choice of outline templates provided, but it’s as easy to start afresh: simply click the Outline button in the toolbar of any blank document.
Creating a quick ‘brain dump’ of thoughts and ideas is simple. You create new topics at the same level by pressing the Return key and add sub-topics underneath by tabbing – you can indent up to nine levels deep this way – and presentationally adjust the spacing of these sub-headings by dragging the level indicators in the document ruler. You can rearrange topics and sub-headings by dragging their outline control – the small icon to the left of the topic heading – and add images, movies or tables to an outline by dragging them from the Media Browser to the relevant part in the outline. If you fancy adding Word-style bullets or numbers to headings, you can do this through the List Styles menu in the Styles Drawer.
If the outline becomes too cluttered, double-clicking an outline control hides the topics within it, and the toolbar’s Truncate button and Levels menu also let you control how much of your outline is visible. When you’ve finished with your outline and want to use it as the basis for a regular document, you just click on the Outline button again.
Thus far, simple. Apple has stuck to its principles: create something easy to use, rather than packing in features that might come with a steep learning curve. The only common situation I wish Pages would address is when you want to make notes in an outline that you don’t want to carry forward into the full body of text. For example, in Microsoft Word, you can specify a certain heading style as ‘hidden’, so that it doesn’t take up space on the page, and if you want to see that text later, it can easily be made visible again. However, you can’t hide text in Pages, so you have to adopt a complicated and unsatisfactory botch job: create a style that uses the same text colour as the background page and miniscule font size, and reapply a different, visible style any time you want to see the text in question.
However, while Pages is great for simple lists, eventually you’ll probably want to use your outline elsewhere. After all, the great value of outlining tools is that they can be used for any purpose: from creating to-do lists to planning entire projects, and you won’t be in iWork all the time. That’s where things begin to get awkward, because Pages’ outline importing and exporting functions are, in a word, awful.
In my case, I wanted to use a basic outline I’d created in OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner Pro to expand in Pages. OmniOutliner is dedicated tool for organising outlines, and offers features such as multi-column outlines that can have different value types. The fact that you can have a ‘numbers’ value type means that it can even be pressed into action as a rudimentary spreadsheet. However, you can also add checkboxes and pop-up lists to your outline and attach documents by dragging them over an outline from the Finder. Indeed, it’s as much personal organiser as it is outliner.
When I first tried it in conjunction with Pages, though there was instant disappointment, as the programs simply wouldn’t talk the same language. Documents exported from OmniOutliner lost their formatting and hierarchy when imported into Pages, and there was no way to take outlines the other way, either.
The only functioning workaround I found was to first export the OmniOutliner document as a ‘Word HTML’ file, open that in Word, save it in ‘docx’ format, and then open this in Pages. It’s a bit of a fiddle.
Only last week, though, when I was playing around with OmniOutliner Pro and noticed that a ‘docx’ export function had been added to the latest version – it was worth a try. It worked: using ‘docx’ as a medium, outlines could be transferred, hierarchy intact, to Pages. Perhaps more surprisingly, support for attachments is included as well. Images and single-page PDFs seem to make the transition intact. As you might expect, however, other documents, such as Pages files, don’t transfer.
It’s just a shame that this ability is only available in the high-end version of OmniOutliner, so you’ll still have to use the long-winded workaround if you’re using a standard version of OmniOutliner or other outlining tool. Apple really needs to include native support for OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), the format shared by many outlining tools, if Pages is to be taken seriously as an outlining application.
Most telling of all, other applications do a better job of sharing information between iWork applications. Pages’ outlines don’t easily transfer across to Keynote, but I’ve happily exported OmniOutliner files – both Pro and standard versions – to Keynote when I needed to create a quick presentation. The export process converts level one headings into separate slides, with lower levels appearing as bullets within those slides (again, unsurprisingly, images don’t make the transition). You can re-organise the outline by dragging the bullets in the source pane.
Performing something similar in Pages requires another workaround. In Pages’ Outline view, you need to collapse the outline so only the main headings are visible, then copy the whole outline and in Keynote switch to Outline view. Select the first slide in the source pane on the left and choose Edit > Paste and Match Style. If you’ve got it right, the top-level topics appear on their own slides, with sub-topics appearing as bullet points underneath the top-level slides.
