By Bob Freud

In junior high school, I thought outlines were a special form of torture invented by English and Social Studies teachers to inflict on their students. "Before you write your report on ancient Rome," I would be told, "make an outline." [Fate has an interesting way of evening the score. Bob is now an English professor.--DG] Of course, I always wrote the report first and did the outline when it was all finished. How could people possibly know what they were going to say until they had said it? At least that was my reasoning. Fast forward a number of years. I frequently read technical material that I want to remember and write papers and articles using my computer's word processor. Now that I can drag items around with my mouse as I outline, and put them back again if I don't like the result, my word processor's outlining function seems indispensable.

Enter the PalmPilot (actually enter the Pilot, add potential litigation from the Pilot Pen folks, then change the name to PalmPilot, and further confuse everyone by calling the newest version the Palm III). Now that I 'm a confirmed outliner, I certainly want to be able to feed my habit while using my handheld computer. The PalmPilot and outlining software seem like a perfect fit. When it works well, the outline experience is about playing with information, about trying this arrangement and then that arrangement to see which one has the most zing. Almost as soon as I started using my PalmPilot, I dreamed of sitting somewhere with my double latte, listening to cool jazz and reorganizing something important. While I do not like write long pieces on my PalmPilot using Graffiti, I do like to take the PalmPilot somewhere other than my office and play around with information I have already entered.

At present four outlining programs are available for the PalmPilot. This article will discuss the pros and cons of the outlining programs available for everybody's favorite handheld device. Table A compares these products.