If you're just looking for a quick way to record and arrange your ideas, more open-ended programs like Inspiration or Fair Witness will probably serve you best. Of course, none of these programs actually make you more creative, and they certainly can't make decisions for you. Already Have You may already own an outliner. When you enter the often-ignored Outline view, a special tool bar appears across the top of the screen, with buttons for creating a hierarchical outline and expanding or collapsing subtopics to any level desired. When your outline is complete, you can switch back to Word's Normal view, and each topic or subtopic will appear as a separate paragraph.
Word can even generate a table of contents based on the topics in the outline.
WordPerfect's outlining is much more limited. Nesting subtopics is a cumbersome process because each new paragraph is inserted on the outline's highest level, so you have to manually demote each new subtopic to the level you want. In fact, WordPerfect's outliner is less of an outliner than it is an automatic paragraph-numbering system. On the downside, the program provides no visual clue as to which topics contain collapsed subtopics and which don't. Symantec's GreatWorks, another integrated program, also offers a respectable outliner.