No matter how often we use the word computer daily, organizing data on our machines—and by extension, our digital lives—isn't that simple. Finding the right software is essential, and most users stick with traditional office suites. However, there are alternatives like TreeSheets, a hierarchical spreadsheet that can replace common templates, mind maps, personal organizers, and some databases.
If your life is a storm of notes, sticky notes everywhere, isolated doodles, and half-filled agendas, maybe you need to organize your data better. That's one of the many tasks technology has tried to absorb in recent years, from early laptops to smartphones and tablets, passing through classic PDAs and an endless legion of hybrids.
However, often good software is enough. Microsoft Excel is usually chosen for compatibility and muscle memory, but if you're willing to try something different, there's TreeSheets. The website presents it as a hierarchical spreadsheet that enables the creation of calendars, lists, grids, tables, structures, bubbles, and much more.
How to Organize Your Data with TreeSheets
The first thing we encounter when opening TreeSheets is its tutorial, and trust me, you need to read it. Like Excel, TreeSheets is easy to learn but hard to master. In essence, each block is a cell that we can edit with a simple double click. New cells are inserted by clicking on its edges (this works in all directions), and to create new grids, we can use the Insert key or Shift+Enter.
Cells within a grid are moved by holding down the CTRL key and using the arrow keys. Copying content works as usual with CTRL+C and CTRL+V, and both Backspace and Delete help us delete cells and grids alike. TreeSheets is designed in a way that encourages making good use of the keyboard, but when it comes to defining layouts, it's best to rely on the mouse. This barely covers the basics of TreeSheets: the rest of the tutorial explains images and styles, search and navigation, tags and hierarchy, and advanced operations. Click on the cell for those sections and use CTRL plus the mouse wheel to zoom in.
Once again: easy to learn, hard to master. TreeSheets probably won't convince hardcore Excel users, but it is much more intuitive than it seems on the surface, and its free-portable-open source trident is always welcome.
Official site and download: Click here
