Tutorial for Carbonfin's Outliner iOS App and Website

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll give you a quick tutorial of an app that I use for outlining writing assignments and research papers, CarbonFin's Outliner.

I'm someone who outlines practically everything, from 50 pages research papers to 5 minute YouTube video scripts.  I have a lot of information spinning around in my head and I find I do a better job of communicating my points if I have a preset organizational structure and I work through my points in a methodical way.  I did a video recently on the 4 great tools that I have used for outlining, but in this video, I'm going to take you through one of those tools, CarbonFin's Outliner App.  

This is a tool that is available for iOS devices and that also has a web-based component, which was important to me.  I don't believe there is a version for Android yet.  It is also one of the few apps that offers the ability to collapse sections, which is important if you are in the habit of creating very detailed, very long outlines.  Let's take a look.

Once you download it from the App store, you'll need to create an account.  This is so that you can access your outlines from the web-based interface as well.  So, normally, when I'm writing from an outline, I write the paper on my laptop and reference my iPad for my outline.  Alternatively, sometimes I create an outline in a word processing program and then write into it, so then my writing and outlining are all in one place.  Outliner is a reference outlining app, but I like to have access to the web-based outline as well, so that I can paste citations, quotes, and examples directly into my outline.  I'd rather not type them all again if I can just cut and paste from the web version.

Okay -- here we are in the iPad version.  Outlines are stored on the left here.  It's a very basic organization -- somewhat ironically for an outline program, there only seems to be one level of organization for your files, but you can apply tags to virtually group your outlines together.  For example, I created a tag for one of my classes and by hitting the Tag icon here at the bottom, I can filter the list to only those outlines.  

The Basics

Alright, let's start a new outline by hitting the plus sign down here.  The easiest way to get started is to just tap up here at the top of the outline and start typing.  You can hit return to get another line that is on the same level or you can hit this icon up here.  Alternatively, you can hit this diagonal adding icon to get a line that is nested under the first level -- a Level 2 line.  You can also get the same result by creating a line and then hitting the arrow to increase or decrease the level.  Once you have established a hierarchy -- or a line with levels under it, you can hit this arrow to the left of the line to collapse those lines under the heading.  Let me show you why I like the ability to collapse.  Here's an outline with lots of details in it.  Without the ability to collapse, the main structure of the outline starts to get lost.  If I collapse everything but the top headings, I can see the basic bones of the paper.  In addition, you can move lines around by hitting this button up here and then using these little handles to the right of the lines to drag and drop them into whatever order you like.  Just remember, whatever lines are nested under it will be moved as well.  Okay -- so those are the basics, let me show you a couple of other things.

Notes and Settings

Instead of adding these references like I have here as a line within my outline, instead I can put that reference in a note.  Just hit this note icon to the right of the line to add a note.  You can also choose to hide or view the notes in the outline's options, which you can get to by hitting this icon to the far right.  Here you can add a tag for organizing the outline into a group, show status (which I'll get to in a second), show the full notes (or not), show just 1 line of the notes, number your outline, hide completed (which I'll talk about in a second as well), make the font smaller, and then you have some options for sharing down here.  So, let's see what it looks like with only 1 line for notes.  And this is what it looks like when you hide the notes.  You can see when there is note attached to a line by the fact that the note icon doesn't have a plus sign in it.  Tapping on the icon brings the note up for editing.

Checkboxes

I use this app for outlining, but other people must use it as a task list, since there is a way to add checkboxes to each line.  Right now I'm showing the checkboxes, so when I check one, you can see it is complete.  If you go back into settings, you can select "Hide Completed" and anything you've checked off will disappear.  I prefer not to show the checkboxes at all, which you can do by turning off "Show Status."  Two more things on the iPad version.  If you are pasting from another document, you can add a new line and paste into it BUT if you are 

Pasting Multiple Lines

and you want them to create multiple lines in your outline, there is a way to do that.  Instead of pasting into a new line, choose these 3 dots up here.  Now choose Paste and you can see each line creates a new line in the outline rather than just one lump of text.  You can see there are other things you can do here like expanding and collapsing everything, checking all the boxes, and copying everything.  You can also

Export

your entire outline from this screen by hitting the Email button, which will email a text version of the outline.  I have my account set to sync automatically, but you can also force a sync with the web version by hitting the sync button up here.  

Let's visit the web version real fast.  Just a warning, the website is a bit of an afterthought compared to the app.  I find it kind of clunky and the lines don't always wrap properly, but it is nice to have a web version to cut and paste things directly into your paper.  You can create a new outline by hitting this link here.  Once you have, you can expand all, collapse all, clear all checkboxes, choose to show notes, and show checkboxes all up under the title.  Everything else is done by clicking on the individual lines like this.  And you will need to remember to Save manually since it doesn't do it automatically (at least as far I could see).  You can also export or print your outline by selecting the file name on the left.  Or import an outline using text or OPML, which must be a standard outline file format.  

And that's it.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!