An outline doesn’t have to be a basic bulleted list – or a hassle to create. Whether you’re taking notes in class, planning a project or brainstorming your next novel, OmniOutliner’s powerful features and flexible designs let you create beautifully formatted, comprehensive outlines with minimal effort. And all your documents sync across OmniOutliner on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro, so you can be productive anywhere. Here are a few tips to help you master the app.

Efficiency matters when you’re getting complex ideas in order – which is why OmniOutliner lets you outline without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. To quickly indent a row, for example, select it and press Tab (Shift-Tab outdents). Or move it up or down with the U or D keys. Just about every action in OmniOutliner is accessible with a shortcut and in macOS Tahoe you can run OmniOutliner shortcut actions right from within Spotlight – for example, the Create New Outline action opens the app and creates a new document with just a few keystrokes.

It’s just as easy to reorganise your outline. Click the Sidebar button to reveal the handy Sections view, where you can see the structure of your entire document, expand and collapse individual sections and rearrange lines and sections by simply dragging them.

Need an extra column or two – say, to note the discussion leader and start time for each agenda item in a meeting? Click the Add Column button in the toolbar.

As you expand on your ideas, OmniOutliner gives you tools to add context. For example, any bullet can have a dedicated note containing text, attachments and even resizable images. (Add a note to the current bullet by pressing Command-' or choosing Edit > Edit Note.) Notes use a different style to set them apart and you can quickly hide all notes when you need to focus on the main points (press Control-Command-').

You can also use the nifty Omni Links feature to reference another section of the current outline or even specific content in another OmniOutliner document. Control-click the text you want to reference and choose Copy Omni Link; then select the text you want to link from and choose Edit > Add Link. You can also share Omni Links (say, in an email or a text message) to let someone jump directly to a specific document or location in a document.

Ready to give your ho-hum outline a little flair? Choose from dozens of themes to apply the perfect combination of colours, fonts and styles; theme colours automatically adapt to your device’s light and dark modes.

Themes are almost infinitely customisable via the Inspector panel: Select any item type and pick your favourite font, size, colour, formatting, alignment, line height, padding and more. Once everything is perfect, choose File > Save as Template to add your custom document to the theme browser so you can use it for your next outline.

OmniOutliner has a traditional search feature, but the Filter field is often more useful, letting you instantly hide everything but the rows containing the text you’re looking for. The Filters feature in the sidebar levels this feature up by letting you save queries that show only rows that match combinations of criteria: keywords, checkboxes, numbers, text in notes and more.

Into automation? OmniOutliner is unmatched in the variety of ways it lets you streamline frequent actions. In addition to supporting macOS technologies such as Shortcuts, Automator, AppleScript and Voice Control, the developer’s JavaScript-based Omni Automation platform lets you create automations that work across all your devices. These scripts and plug-ins can also integrate with Shortcuts and with Voice Control (letting you automate the app with your voice!) and they can query Apple’s Foundation Models to process data and respond to natural-language prompts. For example, the Outline the Clipboard plug-in can create an outline based on the content of the clipboard — useful!

Some OmniOutliner features require the Pro upgrade.