To create a coherent plan for your ideas, outlining tools can help. These apps provide flexibility to change and reorganize points on the fly and make it easy to log your ideas, arrange your arguments, and pull everything together into a polished framework. When choosing an outlining app, consider features such as visual hierarchy, nesting, automatic styling, easy rearrangement, notes, search, tagging, expand and collapse options, and collaboration capabilities. The best outlining apps include Microsoft OneNote, Checkvist, Toodledo, Smartsheet, Workflowy, Little Outliner, OmniOutliner, Tree, Cloud Outliner, OutlineEdit, UV Outliner, Scrivener, Mellel, MagicalPad, Oak Outliner, WhizFolders, Evernote, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word. Zapier can also be used to automate the research process by passing data between more than 500 apps.