Creating Dynamic Lists On a Mac

Here are 5 ways you can create lists on your Mac that allow you to reorder lines and indent items.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at creating Dynamic Lists on your Mac. 
So something that computers should do well is allow you to work with dynamic lists. That would be a list of text where you can move the lines up and down easily and also indent them easily. But surprisingly there's no one app that does this really well. Let's take a look at the options that come with your Mac.
First let's go to the Notes App. In the Notes App you can create two types of lists. Let's look at the most basic kind of list first. I'll just type a few lines of text as an example. Like that. Let's say let's convert that into a list. If I select all of that and I go to the Style button here you can see I've got Bulleted Lists, Dashed Lists, and Numbered Lists. All of these will basically work the same when you're trying to move lines around. Let's choose Numbered Lists. Here I've got everything now as a numbered list. Now if I want to reorder these items I can try to do it by dragging but it doesn't work very well. For instance if I select this text and I try dragging it up and down it really doesn't work very well. If I try the whole line it doesn't really work very well. If I try dragging from this number it doesn't really work. BUT I can reorder with Copy & Paste. That's true for everything I'm going to show you though Copy & Paste really isn't a very efficient way to do this.
However there's a special command that you've got here in Numbers with your cursor blinking in any line. If you go to Format and then look to Move Item you can move up and down using Control Command and then the Up or Down arrows. So this line I can move down with Control Command Down. You can see how it moves down there. See in the Numbered List the numbers remain constant there so the lines are moving and the numbers are changing to match the order they are in now. I can just Control Command and move things Up or Down as I like making Notes a really good option for dynamic lists. In addition you can Indent using Tab which is going to be true for almost all of the examples that I show you. You can keep indenting or you can Outdent using Shift Tab. One problem is if you outdent too much then it breaks the list, like that. However, there's a better option. If you go to Format here and look under Indentation there's Increase and Decrease, which is Command and then the Square Brackets on the keyboard. This is another common thing we're going to see in a lot of apps.
Now if I use this it appears to work just like pressing Tab, and Command and the Left Bracket will work by using Shift Tab. Except it won't go past the beginning there. So I can go In and Out as much as I want without worrying about breaking the list. So Notes has a really good set of Keyboard Shortcuts for Dynamic Lists. But it doesn't do very well when you want to use the pointer to drag things around. Notes also has the ability to do a Checklist by using this button here. A Checklist can use all those same commands. So you can up and down like that. You can indent like that. But in addition to that you can also check the items, which is really handy, and you can go to Format here and then you can use Shift Command U to uncheck or check like that. Plus under Format More you've got Check All, Uncheck All, Move Checked to the Bottom, and Delete Check. In addition under Notes Settings you have the ability to automatically Sort the Checked Items. So Checklists are a unique feature here of the Notes App.
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Now you would think Pages can do Dynamic Lists even better than Notes. But it is not really the case. So here I am in Pages and I'll add some lines. Now I can select all of these lines here and under Format I can go to Bullets & Lists. One thing Pages does better is to give you many more options for Lists. For instance you can do very complex numbered lists like using Harvard Format and all of that. Let's just select Standard Numbered List here and you can see I have a lot of control over the formatting the amount of Indentation, the Size of the numbers, and all sorts of things. I can even, if I choose Bullet Lists choose the type of bullet using any characters I want, even images. So for the look of the lists Pages is the clear winner over Notes. But, unfortunately, there's no keyboard shortcut to move lines up or down. You just can't do it. You can use Cut & Paste of course and you can drag. Dragging is a little tricky. If you were to select a line, like this, and try to drag this it drags the text. So you end up getting things like that when you drag around. However if you just click to select the number or bullet here to the left and drag that then you get this interface that allows you to reorder the lines. You can see with that blue line exactly where the new line is going to go and with a little triangle there you can see the indentation so you can put this three indented under four right here or not indented at all just move it down. So Pages is superior in terms of using your mouse or trackpad to reorder lines. But it doesn't allow you to reorder lines using just the keyboard. You can indent with the keyboard using either Tab, like before, or Shift Tab, or Command and then the right square bracket and left square bracket just like in Notes.
So when I would use Pages over Notes is when you're creating documents and you're more concerned about the look of the final list than actually being able to dynamically manipulate it while editing.
Now, of course, there is an app that is specifically for lists on your Mac. That's Reminders. Well how well does that work when you want to move items around. Here in this Reminders List I can easily add new items by just clicking in there or clicking the Plus Button and I can add one like that. Return and keep adding and get lines like that. I can easily Reorder them by dragging just to the left of the checkbox right there so it is easy to reorder. Also clicking to the left of the checkbox selects the entire item. Now you can use Command and then the Square Brackets to indent pretty easily and you can use the other Square Bracket to go back. You do have a lot of extra features in Reminders like, for instance, the ability to create sections and then have the items under different sections so I can now drag, for instance, these into different sections like that to order things. You can also Sort the list very easily here. Something that is not easy to do in Notes or Pages. So I can sort by title here, like that, and you can see now it is alphabetical. Another thing you can do that is really interesting in Reminders is you can have multiple columns here. So this appears to be just one list but if I do View As Column I now have this as one column and I can add another column, like that, name it something, like that, Add an item to this and you can see I've got these multiple columns for this list here. There actually is another way to view Sections but you can move items between the columns very easily and that is a whole new dimension to a Dynamic List.
Now you would think that Numbers is good at creating Dynamic Lists but it actually falls kind of short. Let's create a new Numbers document here and let's go and get rid of the Headers here and I'm just going to delete the first column and first row like that. I can easily create a list. But there is really no way to indent. Maybe create another column and then move things over although that might be useful and you can't move the rows up and down with the keyboard but you can drag them up and down pretty easily. It is hard to Insert something new between different lines like you can in every other option we've looked at. But you can click here and Add Row Above, Add Row Before. So you can do it. It just takes a few more steps. But you do have good sorting options. Of course you can create multiple columns so the list can actually consist of more than one piece of data. Like you could add a date or a number or something associated with each piece of text and then sort by whichever column you want. So if what you want is really more of a table than an actual list with just one item for each line then Numbers, of course, would be the clear winner there. But you could also use Tables in Pages which borrows most of that functionality from Numbers and works in a pretty similar way.
Finally, let's look at an unlikely candidate here. Let's look at Keynote which is for making presentations. But you can actually use it to make lists in an interesting way. I'm going to choose a basic white scene here and then I'm going to switch the view to Outline View. With Outline View you get something that looks just like a list here on the left but you're actually creating slides. So, for instance, I can create a slide like that and then Return and create another slide. I can create basically a list of slides and on the left it looks like a regular list. If I look at the slide you can see the title of each slide is actually here in the Title part. If I were to go down for a new slide there but then Tab to indent and then put something here you can see how it actually puts it as a Bullet item on that slide, like that. Which is really interesting. I can even Indent like that. The subtitle kind of gets left out. The one thing you may want to do is go to View, Edit Slide Layout and then go to Title & Bullets, which is what we're using, select the Subtitle and get rid of it. Now I'll click Done here and now the slides no longer have that subtitle there getting in the way. Then for this first one I'm actually going to go and change, I'll click the background of the slide here and change the layout to Title & Bullets, like that. So they are all using Title & Bullets and all basically display the main piece of text here as the title and then any subitem as bullet items underneath. Now the interesting thing about this is you can actually drag to reorder these very easily here like that. You can even view as a Light table and see these as individual cards. So this is kind of like making a Dynamic List that is a set of Index Cards. You can flip through them. Reorder them as you like. You can see I can just drag these around like that. I can even Zoom in here a little more if I want to be able to see the text in them and very easily change the order of things. If I want to change what is on the slide I can double click, go back in and you can see I get the outline here. I can reorder things. I can work with all the text here on the left. I can also go to the slide and work with it here. You can see how it shows the change right there.
So Keynote offers a really cool option that is different than all the rest. Hopefully if you're looking to create Dynamic Lists on your Mac I've given you an overview of the different ways you can do it with different apps that you get with your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.
Comments: 2 Responses to “Creating Dynamic Lists On a Mac”

Sheldon
1 week ago
Thanks bunches
Ken Nellis
7 days ago
You can easily use the mouse to reorder items in Notes if you use the table format. This is similar to what you showed with Numbers.
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Creating Dynamic Lists On a Mac

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