[Someonelse812]

I love Omni Outliner, I just want to say that before I start complaining. If I didn't love this program I wouldn't bother to suggest improvements.

I use it for writing, and I write a lot. I have noticed over the last few months that it has been getting slower. there have even been a few time when it would lock up. I figured the file was getting too big so I cut it in half, I put half into one omni file and kept the first half in the original. That helped a lot but I am still having trouble. Little things that it should be able to do are hard for it.

For example, just this morning something happened that annoyed me and inspired me to post here. I copied some text from MS Word into OmniOutliner, then I highlighted the text and hit shift-apple-+ 3 times to increase it's size, I do this all the time with no problem, but today it froze up, I had to restart and I lost everything I had written up to that point.

Any suggestions on how to run Omni Outliner more efficiently, so it doesn't have to think so hard when I need it to do something simple?

Another thing that Omni does that drives me bonkers is making things underlined or bold when I did not want them to be. Like if I hit return and tab to make a sub menu, suddenly its underlined, or bold. I haven't found any pattern to it, I can't predict when it will happen, it just does. How do I make it stop doing that?

[pantherman]

When you press TAB, making something a different level, the item in question takes on the style associated with the level. So if you have a couple of paragraphs at Level 1 and you TAB a sentence to make that sentence a "Level 2 sentence", then that sentence will take on Level 2's style.

If the Level 2 style contains underlining, bold or whatever, then the item will become underlined, bolded etc. You can see what each style contains by looking at the "Style" inspector, which gives a breakdown of all elements in the style for each Level.

Hope this helps.

[Someonelse812]

that does help a little, at least now I know whats going on, Thanks

So is there a way to universally turn that off? or do I have to go row by row through my entire document and do it? I have a huge file compiled, everything I write is pretty much in one huge omni file.

[pantherman]

In the drawer on the left, towards the bottom, you'll see some lines -

All Level 1 rows
All Level 2 rows
All Level 3 rows
etc..


If you select just the line that says, for example, "All Level 2 rows", well, all Level 2 rows in your document will be selected, even if you have hundreds of them and they aren't immediately visible. Then, you can just clear the style on all those hundreds of rows by ctrl-clicking on the line, "All Level 2 rows" and selecting "CLEAR STYLE".

So if your Level 2 rows had "Underline" and "Bold" as part of the Level 2 Style, this will be cleared out.

Careful, though. Clearing the Style will destroy ALL styling and revert the row back to Helvetica. If you just want to make small changes, after selecting the "All Level 2 rows" line, just go to the inspectors which open up on the right (usually) and deselect Underline or Bold from there. This will leave all other aspects of the styles in place.

Styles rock. If you think just a little beforehand about how you want your document to look, with headers, subheaders, body text etc, just like in a word processor, you can get the same effect in OO. Then, you can write entire documents in OO and let the formatting take care of itself real-time.

The difference between OO and word processors with styles, however, is just what you experienced, the ease with which you can move around text from one "level" to the other and the immediated changes in appearance that result. Just tabbing a selected row changes the level and therefore, the style changes immediately, whereas in a word processor, you have to manually change the style associated with any selected block of text, if you want to change "levels".

[DerekM]

Originally Posted by Someonelse812

I figured the file was getting too big so I cut it in half, I put half into one omni file and kept the first half in the original. That helped a lot but I am still having trouble. Little things that it should be able to do are hard for it.

If you haven't yet, please send an email to omnioutliner@omnigroup.com about this. If possible, a copy of the the document would be great so we can do some testing on it to see what's going on. Also the spec of your Mac would be helpful.

Thanks!