Edwin
The majority of the reports that I write have a common structure and purpose. Their objective is to identify 'heritage assets' in archaeological databases, on aerial photographs and on historic maps that would potentially be impacted upon by the construction of gas pipelines. These reports are known as desk-based assessments. They standardly comprise an introduction (giving project details), a methodology (indicating how archaeological sites have been assessed as to importance and how the significance of any impacts have been judged), background archaeological information on the area of the proposed development (by archaeological period, from the Palaeolithic to the 21st century), a description of heritage assets within the study corridor again by archaeological period, a discussion of hitherto unidentified heritage assets that may be present, once again by period, and proposals for further works.
I start by putting all information on known heritage assets into a Geographical Information System. Attribute data is contained in an MS Excel spreadsheet linked to the GIS. Each asset has one line (entry) in the spreadsheet. Additional information (such as PDF schedules of Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments or web pages from national databases) is attached to the relevant entry using xlnotes, an Excel add-in.
When I come to write the report, I switch to Writing Outliner. The introduction and methodology get a single document each. The sections on archaeological background, known heritage assets within the study corridor, and potential assets each have a folder, each of which contains one document per archaeological period (that's usually 10 documents each). The recommendations section comprises a single document.
I will often have project documents available in Word format that I will draw upon to write the introduction section. These are imported into the Research Folder. Most of the reference documents that inform the specifically archaeological sections are in paper format, pdfs or web pages. It is the web pages, pdfs and my spreadsheet, in particular, that I would like to link to Writing Outliner. I cut and paste or manually copy relevant information from these sources into the Notes folder, where they are turned into usable chunks of text that are copied into the relevant section or sub-section document, where they are moved around and polished. The structure of the notes folder more-or-less mimics the structure of the report, though it's usually not as complete. The status icons are invaluable for letting me see which sections are complete, etc., while I normally record the number of heritage assets and the number and significance of impacts in the relevant synopsis field, so that I can remind myself of this information as I write, by hovering the cursor of the right-most edge of the outline.
I used to write all of these text sections in TreePad Business edition, largely because it was too time consuming to scroll up and down the document in MS Word, which was a continual necessity. But the problem with TreePad was that it left a lot of formatting to be done at the end. Both of these problems are solved by Writing Outliner. Writing Outliner also puts all of MS Word's writing and formatting tools at my disposal, which is a big bonus.
As regards whether links should be attached on a per-document or per-project basis, in my opinion it would be very convenient if one could do both. That would allow documents that have a specific relevance to be linked to the document in question, while those with a more general application could be linked to the project. Having said that, most of my very specific documents are linked to my Excel spreadsheet, so I could very easily live with project-level linking only. Also, I would probably prefer to link to files rather than to embed them in the project file, though, once again, both options would be a powerful combination.
Apologies for a very long post; I didn't have time to write a shorter one.
Regards
Derek