This is one of those “Discovered By Accident” tips that I happened upon today in OmniOutliner 3.0 whilst futzing with the Inspectors.

For those unfamiliar with the program, there are five Inspectors — Appearance, Row, Column Type, Document, and Style Attributes — that can be interchangeably docked together or viewed as individual palettes. Each Inspector has a few sub-panes, accessed via icons at its top. For example, Appearance has Color, Font, Underline, etc.

What I discovered today is if you click and hold on an icon, then drag to the right, you start selecting multiple sub-panes. Letting go reveals that the Inspector has been transformed into showing all of the selected panes at the same time:

You can also select arbitrary (including out-of-order) panes using CMD-click. And, if you’re either foolhardy or have a gigantor monitor, this trick works on multiple Inspectors simultaneously.

And what do you know, it works in OmniGraffle as well!

While I was using the Professional editions of both programs, I imagine this would be valid in the regular versions as well — perhaps someone could give it a try.