I recently talked about a single-pane outliner, and decided to try out a two-pane outliner called The Guide. It’s a lot more feature-rich and mature compared to TKOutliner. Outliners are great for planning out your writing, storing information and even managing your to do lists. The Guide is great for planning your outline and offers a second window so that you can continue working and expanding your ideas. It has the look of a Windows help file but of course allows full rich-text editing and allows you to change background colour (for those who get headaches staring at a white background). Another really nice feature is that it can act as a lightweight wiki, storing all your information in one place : you can add internal (and external links) and can easily find information with the useful search features.

The Guide is completely portable, and less than 1 MB! All your work can be exported to RTF format.

I’ve been searching for a simple outline tool for writing and found this little gem, called TKOutline, which happens to be portable. This application is simple to use and is self-contained in a single exe file of 1.2 MB. It exports to text, HTML, OPML and XML.

It features the usual from outlining tools that can’t be found in a typical word processor, such as hiding levels, promoting/demoting and easily moving nodes up and down. This version of TKOutline doesn’t have an undo feature, though, so keep that in mind as you write your outline!