WritingOutliner vs DocxManager

Posted in: Word, Word addin by Edwin on October 28, 2022 | 3 Comments

Both WritingOutliner and DocxManager have been developed for the same goal – outliner-organized, project-based writing with Microsoft Word. But the implementations are different.

User Interface
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– WritingOutliner is a Word add-in, which is embedded into Word window.
– DocxManager is the other way around – Word is embedded into the DocxManager main window.

I was trying to replace WritingOutliner with DocxManager, but it turned out that the way DocxManager controls Word makes it impossible to achieve good speed and smoothness when switching from a document to another.

Data storage
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– With WritingOutliner the Word documents in a project are stored in a SQLite database file.
– With DocxManager the Word documents are stored in the file system.

Each storage has its own advantages and disadvantages. Storing documents in a database in WritingOutliner makes it difficult to share and co-edit documents, and I’m planning a new feature that solves this problem – by storing the working documents in the file system so you can edit the documents externally, and WritingOutliner takes care of auto syncing back the changes to the database. That’s the initial idea.

A great article about writing a book in Word

Posted in: Word by Edwin on October 20, 2009 | No Comments

For people who want to write a book, be it a novel or a technical manual, this article contains  very helpful information, including using styles to simplify the format tasks, navigating your book, generating table of contents, and so on.

On the other hand, this informative tutorial shows the weaknesses of Word as a book writing software, and those weaknesses are exactly what Writing Outliner Word addin is trying to solve. For example, that article tells you how to navigate your long document, how to generate the table of contents, how to format the section names and chapter names of your book, how to edit  each part as a separated file and combine them at the end, and so on, you’ll find these tasks are still involves  quite a few hassles, and the good news is, these tasks will be  extremely easy with Writing Outliner Word addin, I promise 😉

Why Writing Outliner (Book writing software) is developed as a Word addin?

Posted in: Word by Edwin on September 21, 2009 | No Comments

What is a Word™ addin?

Microsoft knows although Word™ is a very powerful word processor it cannot cover all requirements of all users, for example, writers need functionalities to allow them to manage their long writings or a series of documents, to easily manage and view their research materials, to take notes, to brainstorm, to outline their ideas, and so on.

So Microsoft provides a programming interface for 3rd party software vendors to add functionalities to Microsoft Word™ by developing the so called Word addins (some people call them addons). In other words,  Word add-ins are software modules developed to work with and enhance Microsoft Word™ to accomplish some particular tasks.

Why Writing Outliner is developed as a Word addin?

Good question!

Microsoft Word™ is the leading software product in the Word processing industry, and most publishers accepts only book drafts in Word document format.  If Writing Outliner is developed as a standalone writing software like other novel or story writing software, the writers will have to export their drafts and load in Microsoft Word™ to do some further formatting works, what a pain!

With Writing Outliner being developed as a Word add-in authors get all their writing software tools in one place, the whole writing process from researching, outlining, note taking, transcribing, editing, to final formating, is streamlined!

Keep up with our development!

Writing Outliner is under development curently, you can sign up as a beta tester here.