The Outliner of Giants
'that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.'
Bernard of Chartres
- The Outliner of Giants is a feature rich outline processor designed to support the creation and management of large corpuses of information, such as those generated by students, researchers, writers and project managers.
- The basic service is free to all users, and always will be (limits apply to free accounts);
- Free users can create up to 5 separate outlines, paid users can create an unlimited number of outlines.
- Paid accounts are $4 (USD) for 90 days, $10 for one year, or $25 for three years.
- It's secure, using Google's own user accounts system and an encrypted internet connection;
- Import and export your data at any time using the popular OPML format (it's commonly used to share data between different outlining applications);
- Create expressive outlines using rich-text formatting (both Markdown and Textile are supported), by embedding content from third-party sites - such as images, videos & maps - or by attaching your own files (limits apply to free accounts);
- Free users can upload up to 50MB of files in a 30 day period, with a maximum file size of 1MB. Paid users can upload up to 1GB of files in a 30 day period, with a maximum file size of 50MB.
- Collaborate with friends and colleagues by giving them editing access to your outlines, enabling you to brainstorm in real-time (limits apply to free accounts);
- Free users can collaborate with up to two people, paid users can invite up to 30 other users to access their outline.
- Access your outlines on a range of different devices including desktop PCs running Mac OSX, Windows or Linux; tablet computers such as the iPad; as well as from any phone running iOS, Android or Windows Phone;
- Use the full-text search to quickly find the information that you are looking for, making the service ideal for personal information and knowledge management (limits apply to free accounts);
- Free users can search within each of their outlines, paid users can also search across all of their outlines at the same time.
- Your finished outline can be exported in a range of formats, including directly to the Google Drive document editor, or transferred to a desktop Word Processor, such as Microsoft's Word or Apple's Pages;
- Finally, you can publish your finished outline so that your hard work can be shared with others online.
- The basic service is free to all users, and always will be (limits apply to free accounts);
- As one of the earliest mainstream computer applications, Outliners have a long history, and remain popular because they can be adapted to a broad range of uses, including:
- As a device for taking structured lecture notes or meeting minutes, allowing you to break them down into bite-sized chunks that can be re-organised or added to at a later date.
- As a tool for writing school essays, college term reports, university dissertations, and academic papers & thesis, helping you to create a high level overview of a topic area, before iteratively expanding the text to fill in the gaps.
- As a 'knowledge foundry' into which you can pour ideas, snippets, links and other information, and which can continually be re-ordered and re-categorised to help you pull out the patterns in your research.
- As an application to support novel or screenplay writing, helping you to quickly create a high level narrative, before diving down into the detail.
- As a way of organising the complex information associated with projects such as tasks you still have to do, decisions made, and a project's supporting documentation.
- Born out of frustrations in finding a decent platform & device independent HTML5 outliner, the The Outliner of Giants aims to offer a simple solution to those seeking the best web-based outlining app.
- Simply sign in using your Google account, or create a new account if you don't have one already (they're really useful!).
- If you're a user of Google Chrome you can also install the app from the Chrome Web Store.
Device independent
Use the same outlining application across all of your connected devices.
Structured
Keep your information organised using an adaptable hierarchical structure.
Rich
Enrich your outlines with content from third-party sites, such as images, videos and maps.
Fast
The in-line editor allows you to quickly add content to your outlines using rich text, textile or markdown.