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One of the most important parts of PowerNotes is the Project Outline. The Project Outline is a great way to manage your project, and it offers options that are not available in the PowerNotes sidebar that comes with the browser extension.

To access the Project Outline, you will first need to enable PowerNotes in your browser. If it is not already enabled, click on the PowerNotes icon in the upper right corner of your browser window (shown below).

Then click the "Enable PowerNotes" toggle (shown below).

Then click the PowerNotes logo in the bottom right corner of your browser.

This will open PowerNotes on the right side of your browser. Click on the "Project Outline" option. You will be taken to a site for your project in a new tab in your browser.

The new page should look something like this. At the top of the page, you have the title of your project and its description. Below, there are two symbols. The one on the left is the "Sharing" icon (see "Sharing your Project"), and the one on the right is the Export option (see "Exporting from PowerNotes").

Before your project topics are listed, you will see an area labelled "+ Add Project Comment" (shown above). Comments you place here—which could include anything from your thoughts, a list of ideas, a quotation, or a link—are not attached to any of the project topics that subdivide your project. This means this is a great place to put things that you're not sure where they should go, or things that may be relevant to the entire project as a whole and not applicable to a singular topic.

Below the section for project comments, there is a section for the different topics in your project (shown above). Next to the topic labeled "Background", there is a symbol of three vertical dots. This allows you to make edits to a topic (shown below). This allows you to delete topics, but also to move or copy topics between projects, which could be useful if you have several projects that build upon each other.

To the right of each topic is an area to "Add Freeform Note". This will be discussed in more detail in the "Gathering Sources" section.

To the right, this panel (shown below) allows you to sort and manage your project.

The "Sort By" option shown on the left sorts the information on the entire Project Outline page. By default, the overall page is sorted and subdivided based on the topics in your project, meaning any quotations, notes, etc. that you've gathered are shown as being part of whichever topic you had assigned it to. If you wanted to sort the quotations, notes, etc. that you've gathered by date, source, or editor instead, you can select that here.

There are several reasons you may want to do this. In the case of sorting by date, you would be able to sort your work on your project by the date in which you gathered that information. When the project is small, this may not seem useful, however, if you have a larger research project, this may become very useful.

Sorting by source could be very useful if, for instance, you wanted to see all of the quotations you've obtained broken down by which source they belong to instead of which topic they've been grouped under, which could be necessary if you are using a single source to argue multiple different topics within your paper, or if one source is cited multiple different times.

Sorting by editor will sort your Project Outline page by which of the editors on your project added each individual piece of information. If you are sharing your project with multiple other people, and you want to see which work you, or one of your peers, has contributed, this would be a good option to select.

The next section (shown above) allows you to manage topics and project details. If you select the square next to each topic, only that project will be shown on the outline. You can also add topics by selecting the option in the bottom left. You can get more advanced options by selecting the cog symbol in the upper right corner. A new window will be opened (shown below).

This page mainly allows you to add or edit topics. As it describes:

"Hover over the topic you want to edit. change colors by clicking on the colored circles. Reorder topics by dragging and dropping. Add topics here or in the extension while doing research."

It also offers a tip: "You can add outline formatting to your topic names (I, A, 1, i, etc.)."

If, for instance, you wanted your project to be structured linearly—1. Introduction, 2, 3, and 4 being body paragraphs, and 5. Conclusion—you could do this by following their tip.

If you click the "Project Details" option to the left, it will bring you to a new page.

This page does not do anything complex, but it does allow you to change your project name and description if you need to.

The last portion (shown below) of the Project Outline page is for filtering out what content is shown on the Project Outline screen.

Under "Content Filters", deselecting the "Highlights" option will remove any highlighted text you have selected as a quotation. See "Gathering Sources" for more information on highlighting text and creating citations. Deselecting "Notes" will remove any notes you've added to your project from view. Deselecting "Citation Info" will remove being able to see formatted citations from view, usually below highlighted text.

Under "Card Filters", deselecting "Sources" will remove any sources and their associated information from view. This is different from deselecting just "Highlights" or "Citation Info" from before because it removes everything associated with sources from view, not just the highlighted text or the citation itself. Bookmarks are a way to mark pages and sources you would like to return to later. Deselecting Bookmarks will remove these from view (see "Gathering Sources" for more info). Deselecting "Freeform Notes" will naturally also remove those from view.

Lastly, there's an option at the bottom to remove any comments you or any of your project contributors have left from view.