Archive for April, 2010
A proposal for project-level style in Writing Outliner Word addin
Posted in: Book writing software by Edwin on April 29, 2010
Style in Word is a good tool for formatting large documents, however, the UI design of Microsoft Word seems does not encourage the use of style.
Obviously, as a Word addin which claims its main purpose is to deal with book-length documents in Word, Writing Outliner should take advantage of the underlying styling features of Word. There are also several posts related to styles in the Writing Outliner Word addin beta test forum.
So this will be my next major work for the upcoming beta version 4. And here is my proposal, and I appreciate all kinds of input.
Note: if you haven’t tried Writing Outliner Word Addin nor you have looked at the screenshots of it, you’ll find the following description a little difficult to understand, because it’s based on the UI of this Word addin.
- In the left project outline, there is a top-level folder called “Template Repository”.
- Under that “Template Repository” you can insert new Word documents, each of which defines a set of style sheets you can use in any Word documents all across the project.
- In each “style template document”, you define styles in a visual “what you see is what you get way”, look at the screenshot below, each text line in the “style template document” defines two things:
- The text line itself is the style name.
- How a line looks like is exactly how that style that’s named after that line looks like.
- Once a “style template document” is defined, you can select a specific “style template” for each drafts in the writing project; If you don’t specify one, the default one will be used.
- You can only define styles in the “style template documents”, because the styles are global in the project. Does this make sense?
That’s all for now as a starting point. Honestly, I don’t have too much experiences of using styles in Word, so I will really appreciate your input!
BETA 3 update 1 – Slightly enhanced the interactive between the tabs and the Project Manager.
Posted in: Version History by Edwin on April 25, 2010
I have just uploaded beta 3 update 1, which includes some minor changes, especially for the newly introduced multi-column outliner which helps get a big picture of the selected portion of the project and manage it easily.
- Fixed the two issues reported by Taxi in this thread in the beta test forum.
- Fixed the second issue reported by Andrej in the beta 3 announcement thread.
- And slightly improved usability of other parts of this Word add-in.
BTW, I’m going to make some demo videos for Writing Outliner .
Writing Outliner Beta 3 Is Released!
Posted in: Version History by Edwin on April 24, 2010
Full-featured multi-column outliner
At the bottom of the multi-column outline you can see the total words/characters and target words/characters, so that you see the progress of any portion or the whole project. A picture worth a thousand words:
Search snippets preview and auto locating
go to the exact matching places easily when searching documents. See my previous blog post for details.
Project restore (and backup, of course!)
Project restore function – now you can revert the entire project to any previous revision which was saved manually or automatically! . See my previous blog post for details and screenshots.
New graphical visual outline style
Emphasis the hierarchical relationships – and you can switch back to the old text-based style, of course! screenshot:
Auto document synopsis extracting
Extract synopses from documents so that you can see the overview in the multi-column outliner.
- Customize the outliner – show/hide columns, switch between visual styles – shape-based or text-based.
- More outline structuring functions – indent, outdent, etc, with keyboard support!
- More friendly modified/created time showing, e.g. use “Today”, “Yesterday” instead of the ordinary long datetime showing.
- When opening a Writing Outliner project in the Welcome pane, it will be opened in a new Word window instead of asking you to close the current Word document first.
- Other improvements and bugfixes.
Thanks for your attention, folks! And I’m looking forward to you feedback!
I’ve been extremely busy in the past month, in the upcoming days I will still have a lot of work to do – mainly preparing for the first commercial release, and it’s very late here now, I’ve got to have a sauna and take a rest now now!
Have fun play with the new version, don’t’ forget to give me feedback via email or the online best test forum.
Instant Word document search with matching snippets preview
Posted in: Word addin by Edwin on April 17, 2010
I’d like to show you my recent works with regard to the Writing Outliner Word Add-in proejct.
Check the screenshot below, now you can instantly preview the matching snippets when doing a full text search search, and the best thing is that the keyword will be highlighted in Word’s6 document window once you select any of the matching snippets! And it will be available in the next release. Can’t wait to try it? Let me know then 😉
Currently, I’m working on the multi-column outliner which was discussed in the beta test forum, stay tuned!
New visual style for the outliner
Posted in: Outliner Software by Edwin on
Hi Folks,
Take a look at the new visual style for the outlines in Writing Outliner Word Add-in below, It will be available in the next release 😉
I think the new visual style makes the hierarchical relationships of the documents more prominent, as a result, you get a better big picture of the whole project. What do you think? Do you like it?
Auto Word document backup and restore in Writing Outliner
Posted in: Word addin by Edwin on April 14, 2010
I’m working on new things, such as improving the full text word document search function in Writing Outliner Word Add-in.
In the mean time I’d like to show you the confirm restore dialog which appears right before restoring a project to a previously saved revision, it also asks you if you’d like to save a new copy of the current project before performing the actual restore action, and it’s default option – to reduce the risk of overwriting new content by mistake.
Automatic Word documents backup
To summarize, Writing Outliner Word Add-in does not only make working on multiple related Word documents in one place easier (the so called project-centric approach), but also makes backup and restore your Word documents easily:
- Anytime you can save a backup copy of the entire project as a revision to which you can revert at a later time (if needed);
- If you want, Writing Outliner Word Add-in can also automatically saves a backup copy of the entire project as a revision upon closing a modified project.
- You can view the revision number, backup time and remarks of each backup in the revision list window, see my previous post.
- You can restore your writing project to a previous revision in case you need to do that.
I’ll show you the new search snippet and auto locating feature soon.