[ANN] New release of Writing Outliner – v1.5

Posted in: Outliner Software, Version History by Edwin on June 17, 2011

A new version of Writing Outliner software for MS Word has just been released, this blog post summaries  what’s new in this release of Writing Outliner for MS Word.

Last chance to buy [Writing Outliner] + [MindVisualizer] for $69 only!

With the current [Writing Outliner] + [MindVisualizer] bundle promo, you can get both of these programs for $69 only, and this promo will end in a week!

Buy the bundle now!

New/improved features in this release:

• New: Export Entire Project Data.
  You can now export all documents (with the meta data) from current project to a folder in your computer – you no longer have to worry about vendor lock-in – because with this new function you can save all your project data, not only the documents but including all the document properties (notes, synopsis, tags, word counts, etc) to files that can be read by other programs (MS Word, specifically).
  To use this new function, Click the Menu button then select ‘Export Project…’
• New: Project-wide global replace.
  After doing a full text search, several options will be provided for replacing the matched strings in you project documents:
  Replace all matched strings in the entire project;
  Replace all matched strings in the selected document;
  Replace all matched strings in the selected branch;
  Replace the selected match string only.

• Enhanced project compile option and operation:
  1 – New: Allow generating TOC at the end of the compiled output document.
  2 – New: Allow generating TOC even the ‘include document titles’ option is not checked, useful if you want to use different headings other than the document titles in the outline view in the compiled output.
  3 – Writing Outliner will show a message to inform the user if no documents meet the compilation options, when compiling a branch of your writing project outline.
• New: New copy, cut and paste outline commands
  Now you can copy and paste documents within a project with these new commands available in the outline view.  BTW, you can also use these new commands as a compromised solution for ‘templates’, instructions:
  1 – Open a project and create a folder called ‘Templates’;
  2 – In the new ‘Templates’ folder, create and edit documents which will be the ‘template documents’;
  3 – Whenever you need to create new documents base on the ‘templates’, copy the desired source document from the ‘Templates’ folder.

• Enhanced left outline view.
  1 – New: New outline view option: wrap document titles – good for long titles;
  2 – Removed the right-most column in the left outline which used to host the floating button, to better use your screen estate.
  3 – New: New outline view option: Hide the document icons, so that you can have more spaces for the more important info in the outline view.
  4 – It doesn’t show the word count next to the document title in the left outline, for a cleaner view of the outline, if you need such info for the project documents, please use the Multi-column Outliner instead.
• Enhanced Multi-column Outliner tab.
  New: Added new ‘Edit Document Text’ command in the Multi-column Outliner tab.
  Fixed: Settings of the Multi-column Outliner is not saved after reopening the project.
• New: Enhanced drag-and-drop operation
  Now you can hold down the <Ctrl> key to copy documents within a project, or between two projects, during a drag-and-drop operation in the outline view.
• New: Better Multi-column Outline export function.
  Now you can generate a MS Word table which contains exactly the same set of data as in the Multi-column Outliner tab.
  To use this new function, click the ‘Export To Word Table’ link which can be found at the bottom of the Multi-column Outliner tab.
• New: Always open a project in a new Word window.
  Now WO always open or create a new project in a new Word document window, no more messages such as “Would you like to close the current project first?” This simplify things a lot and make the process more logical from the view point of the end users.
• New: Allow closing a Writing Outliner project by closing the MS Word window.
  This is more logical and saves your time.
• Use MS Word’s “File -> Open” to open projects.
  Writing Outliner can now open Writing Outliner projects using MS Word’s build-in File -> Open command.
• New: Check for updates.
  Now if you click the ‘Check for updates’ link which can be found at the bottom of the left pane, a web page will open in your web browser and tells if you have the latest version of the Writing Outliner software, if you don’t a link will be provided for downloading the latest release.
• Enhanced software problem report generation.
  All software contains bugs, and the software developers should try their best to avoid and fix as many bugs as possible. Writing Outliner includes a bug report generating function which contains technical info that will help the developer fixing the problem. And in the new release, this function has been improved a lot.
• Updated underlying SQLite database engine
  Updated the underlying SQLite database engine which serves as the file storage for the writing project files.
• Updated underlying MS Office add-in development engine
  The 3^rd party software development kit on which Writing Outliner relies has been updated to its latest version.

Fixed problems in this release:

• Fixed: The ‘export individual document to disk’ function doesn’t work if your document title contains a dot.
• Fixed: Unwanted blank lines are being added to the end of the document after being edited.
• Fixed: an incorrect message shows up telling you that the project file is being opened by other programs, when opening a project file that’s cloned by the ‘copy project file to…’ command.
• Full-text search:
  1 – Fixed: Duplicated search results when doing a “phrase search” (a phrase search means several words enclosed by double quotes).
  2 – Fixed: After doing a “phrase search” clicking on a search result in the left outline, only the first word of the search phrase are selected in the MS Word document window.

• And some other bugfixes.

How to get the new version of Writing Outliner?

Trial version download link here, download now!

Full version download:

For the full version download link please check the email you received when ordering Writing Outliner.

And finally, the user manual for Writing Outliner has been completed!

And the user manual is authored by Writing Outliner itself 🙂

[screenshots] The ‘Global Replace’ function is based on full-text search

Posted in: Outliner Software, Version History by Edwin on June 15, 2011

The following are the screenshots of the new ‘global replace’ function in the upcoming version of Writing Outliner for MS Word on Windows.

As you can see in the screenshot, once you entered a string in the search box on the top of the left pane when a writing project is open, below the search box a new ‘Replace’ button will appear with various replace commands, for the example, the ‘Replace All Matches In Selected Branch’ menu command will replace all full-text search matches in the selected branch (be it a folder or a document with sub-documents).

Finally! I can release a new version of Writing Outliner now!

Upcoming: Global replace in a writing project

Posted in: Outliner Software by Edwin on June 8, 2011

A quick update about the development and new release of Writing Outliner – first version of the Writing Outliner user manual has been completed and I’m now working on the new ‘project-wide global replace’ function. After that the new version of Writing Outliner will be publicly released (in a few days I guess).