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.

1. In the left project outline, there is a top-level folder called “Template Repository”.
2. 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.
3. 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:
   1. The text line itself is the style name.
   2. How a line looks like is exactly how that style that’s named after that line looks like.
4. 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.
5. 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.

1. Fixed the two issues reported by Taxi in this thread in the beta test forum.
2. Fixed the second issue reported by Andrej in the beta 3 announcement thread.
3. 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

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:

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.

Auto project backup and more – Writing Outliner Word Add-in BETA 2

Posted in: Version History by Edwin on March 31, 2010

Hi Folks,

I’m getting a great amount of valuable feedbacks from emails and the beta test forum since the first beta of Writing Outliner Word Add-in was release 15th this month, thank you all, guys!

Of course in such a short time I couldn’t get all suggestions and problems fixed, but here is the list of the new stuff in this second beta release of Writing Outliner Word Add-in – the all-on-one writing tool for writers.

And I’ll be working on the rest, please don’t hesitate to give me more feedbacks through:

1. The beta test forum, or
2. Email me directly.

Download the new release (BETA 2) here.

Manual or automatic project backup

You write/edit Word documents a lot, you have to backup your documents frequently.

Word document backup with Writing Outliner has become easy now, it allows you backup your whole Writing Outliner project anytime as you wish, or simple let Writing Outliner takes care of it for you – automatically backup the modified writing project upon closing. See the screenshots below:

Quick Word document import, a great time-saver!

Quickly (with two clicks) import currently opened Word document to a specified Writing Outliner project.

It’s very easy, just click the ‘Import Current Document’ link in the Welcome pane and then select the target project you want to import to. Once it’s done, you open the target project and you’ll find the imported Words documents under the newly introduced INBOX folder. Screenshots:

Other improvements

• Move a document up or down in the Project Manager Outliner with keyboard <Ctrl + Up/Down>;
• Added the ‘address bar‘ to the embedded File Explorer tab, so that when doing document importing or exporting you can quickly navigate to a folder;
  
• Now ignorable notification messages are shown with the small notification window that appears at the lower right part of your screen, so that your workflow will not be interrupted (Like what Outlook, MSN/Live Messenger do).
  

Bugfixes:

• Project notes are missing after re-opening the project several times;
• In a rare case the document synopsis, tags or notes sub-pane in the Document Properties Pane (only the UI itself, not your data) will disappear until you reopened Microsoft Word.
• Temporary Word documents that are used internally by Writing Outlinier Add-in are no longer be added to Word’s ‘Recent Document List’, so you’ll not be seeing strange document names like 1AE63565B5E04ACB8674659621A9AA89.docx;
• Avoid moving the special ‘Compiled Output’ document node with drag and drop.

Download the new release (BETA 2) here.

Enjoy the new beta release!

Let’s start the BETA test of Writing Outliner Word Add-in!

Posted in: Book writing software, Version History by Edwin on March 15, 2010

Hi Folks,

Finally, I can start the beta test of Writing Outliner Word Add-in today!

What you can do with this version?

• Project-centric writing, keep all files together;
• Use the Project Manager Outliner to outline book-length documents, each outline item is associated with a Word document.
• Tabbed document editing – edit multiple Word document at the same time;
• Instant, Google-alike full text search, find any documents in the project, you can search by text, title, status, label, tags, notes, synopsis, or match all these fields!
• Document tagging and search by document tags, for example, search by “tag:MyTagA or tag:MyTagB“
• Attach icons (status and label) to documents and search by the icons, for example,  you can specify the status icon of certain documents as “Needs Review”, and when you want to see only those documents, all you need to do is to  input “status:needs review” in the search box.
• Import existing documents (supports doc, docx, RTF, text, wri, all file formats that supported by MS Word).
• Embedded File Explorer tab for viewing and importing files in your harddisk, or  exporting files from a Writing Outliner project to disk.
• Drafts compilation and branch compilation, the Drafts folder or a specific document branch will be merged for output.
• And so on…

You can see some screenshots in my previous blog post.

And I hope you think this is a good start!

Download and feedback

Please download the beta version here.

Please report bugs, make suggestions and post comments in the beta test online forum.

Thank you!

Update 1

I have just uploaded a new version which solves the following two problems:

1. Error message is displayed when opening the sample project: “Wrong Project Property: Modified (Last Modified Time)”;
2. The error report technical information does not contain the most important info for locating the source of the problem.

Sorry for the problem, please download it again!

Update 2

If you couldn’t download the software with the above link, please DO let me know, and try this download link.

Writing Outliner Word addin will not get in your way when you don’t need it

Posted in: Word addin by Edwin on March 10, 2010

Just now I received an email from someone,  he concerned once Writing Outliner Word add-in is installed, will it get in his way when he is not working on documents that need Writing Outliner Word addin.

His original question:

Your outliner looks very promising, but I’m wondering if after installation Word will always start with it or is it possible to have the options for a clean startup and a startup with the outliner? I’m new to Word addins.

The answeris: No, Writing Outliner will not get in  your way when you don’t need it.

Look the screenshot below, it only shows a small vertical strip on the left of your Microsoft Word main window.

Why this UI design instead of using a Ribbon item (or a toolbar/menu item in pre-2007 versions of Microsoft Word)?

Because you can recall it with just one-click!

Don’t like my idea? Tell me please, my mind is always open, you know, I’m not a writer and I am trying to write an all-in-one writing tool for writers, so my mind needs to be wide open to get ideas from you

Turning Word into an outliner software, more new screenshots!

Posted in: Book writing software, Outliner Software by Edwin on March 8, 2010

Hi Folks,

I’m finalizing the preparation for the beta test of Writing Outliner Word addin, just now, I have setup a forum for discussion of the beta test process, it will be ready before the 15th of this month, there are some other things to do before that though. In the mean time, please have a look at the new screenshots of this Word addin.

Using  Microsoft Word™ as an outliner software

The main screenshot of Window 2003 with a Writing Outliner project opened, doesn’t it look a outliner software

Search your word documents like Google!

Yes! The search function in Writing Outliner is almost as powerful as Google With it you can instantly find any Word documents. An example search string (search documents that contains phrase  ’New York tims’ and doesn’t contain ‘dontIncludeThisWord’ and have two tags: mytag1 and mytag2 ):

“New York Tims” tag:mytag1 OR tag:mytag2 -dontIncludeThisWord

Browsing Disk Files Inside Word

One of the important idea behind Writing Outliner for Word is: Do all things related to writing in Word with tabs without even leaving Word. And this embedded File Explorer is an example, with it you can easily drag and drop files to import them into the project, or the other way around, drag documents from a Writing Outliner project to export it to the disk. And your can smoothly view your research files on the disk without switching to other windows! The embedded File Explorer is full featured like Windows Explorer!

Easily word document tagging

The document tagging function is very usable,  I learnt a lot UI design ideas from Gmail, Actually, I’m a lazy man, I hate unwanted mouse clicks

The blank-project wizard tab

Stay turned, the beta testing starts soon!