InSight

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 08, 2009

InSight--in theory, at least--allows users to create outlines to organize information. Unfortunately, we found the program so confusing and unintuitive that it didn't allow us to do much of anything.

The program's interface contains a lot of unfamiliar-looking buttons. We were hoping that with a little bit of practice it would all start to make sense to us, but that didn't turn out to be the case. Even the program's QuickStart Guide was hard to understand (in part, we think, because of its obnoxious, 1990s Web site-style wallpaper, which made the text hard to read). We read and fiddled, read and fiddled, and finally started making our first outline. The entire process was unintuitive, and when we realized that the drag-and-drop option for rearranging topics only sort-of worked, we gave up.

Does the program have special features? Perhaps it does, but we could barely perform the basics. We do like the fact that, as opposed to making outlines in a word-processing program, InSight displays a tree hierarchy of topics, and that users can theoretically move around within the outline using links to other parts of it. The program seems quite full of features, actually, but we found the whole thing so time-consuming and frustrating that we just didn't really care. InSight has a 21-day trial period. It installs politely but leaves a file behind upon removal. We do not particularly recommend this program; there are easier, more intuitive ways to make outlines.