Five features that make Legend a fantastic tool

There is no organisational tool that offers the same diversity of uses, especially at this price

There is so much depth to the Legend app, and many great features to stay organised in your life, work or hobbies.

Once you have got your head around the system of documents, panes and boards (check out this article for the details), you need to start laying out your notes and items to get yourself organised.

Legend isn’t like those other outliners — it is far more powerful, and to help you unlock more of it, here are 5 features that can help you with setting up your workflow:

1. Using item types and prefixes for formatting

Legend uses prefixes to give each item special types for both style and function. For example:

The use of the forward slash key to unlock a menu of interactions ( / ), is a common shortcut with organisation/text tools these days:

This menu is really helpful as a formatting shortcut. Eventually you can learn the prefixes for each kind of item, for example pressing the # key and then a space formats that line as Header 1.

2. Set up some filters on your panes to show the important information

If panes are the powerhouse for creating viewing options in Legend, filters are really where the magic happens.

While a document holds all your information and items, you can set different filters in your panes to display specific information. Or you can set up 5 panes in a board, each with a different filter to focus on something specific.

To open up the filter pane, flick the filter bar in the top right of a pane. Using the dropdown you can select the one, or many filters to apply. Once you are a bit more familiar with filters, try typing terms into the search bar to set the filters for a pane.

As an extra, if you want a short walk through on setting up filters in the app, check out this video on YouTube — it also has a short introduction to using advanced filters.

There is a short guide to creating a kanban board using this feature you can find here.

3. Use zooming to focus your panes on specific parts of your document

This is a useful feature to know about whether you are focusing on a single project for the day and want to cut out the distractions, or you want to set different panes in a workflow for certain parts of the document.

To set up zooming for a certain document, make sure it has been formatted with headers, and then use the document selector sidebar on the left of a pane to choose the part of the document you want to zoom into.

You can open the document selector using the button in the top left of a pane, as shown in the gif below.

4. Change the view settings of your panes to create custom workflows

The different types of information that can be stored in a document and the ability to change the views of that is one of the features that set Legend apart form other productivity tools.

You can open a to do list, a calendar and an email inbox side by side in one board, and drag and drop items between them based on what you want to do. You have probably seen the short gif example on the legend home page of what this looks like.

There are many in depth ways you can use the view mode functions on each pane to change the way you are looking at your information.

5. Use inferred hierarchy to create flat view documents you can collapse

The last feature I want to point out isa recently new feature, using header size to infer hierarchy of information. With inferred hierarchy you can collapse a header with all its information beneath it, including any smaller headers beneath it.

Before this update, Legend operated like any other outliner, using the tab key to indent a line and create hierarchy beneath collapsable headers/titles. using inferred hierarchy, you can create flat documents that display your information without having to indent to create hierarchy, so you can hide all items and sub headers without all the indenting.

To create a different size header, use the / key or right click on the item to open menus that allow the changing of the item type to the size header, and then instead of indenting with the tab key under each header you can continue typing like a text editor document, just with the power of tags, filters and prefixes.

I hope you found this short introduction to a few features useful, I’m interested to hear what else you would like to see?

If you have any requests for features you want a more in depth look at, workflow creation guides or general things you need help with, then let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to help with them.