V2.1.54 supports multi file formats – and full-text searchable!

Posted in: Version History by Edwin on February 8, 2023

You can now import any format of files to your writing project, including Adobe pdf, plain text, images (png, jpg, gif, svg, Photoshop ps, and so on), RTF, and so on. These kinds of files usually serve as research/reference materials.

Built-in sophisticated viewer/editor for pdf files, plain text files and image files.

For other kinds of file, you can open it with the associated external programs, and Writing Outliner will auto save it back to the project database if you edit it.

The pdf files and plain text files are also full-text searchable (in addition to the previous full-text search of Word documents).

More:

Significantly simplified/restructured the internal structure of the software, which makes Writing Outliner much easier to maintain and extend.

A bunch of other small enhancements, bugfixes and optimizations.

Derek Cater’s workflow of writing archaeological technical reports

Posted in: Novel Writing Software by Edwin on July 19, 2010

User Derek Cater shared with us his workflow of writing archaeological technical reports with Writing Outliner, it’s worth reading if you want to write technical reports in Microsoft Word, because as Derek said, without an outliner,

it was too time consuming to scroll up and down the document in MS Word, which was a continual necessity.

Derek also mentioned the problem with other outliner software is that other outliner software  usually lack advanced formatting features that Microsoft Word has (and of which Writing Outliner can take advantage):

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.

So to conclude, if you often write long Word documents, give Writing Outliner Word Add-in a try and you pain will go away.

Turn Microsoft Word™ into a powerful outliner software

Posted in: Book writing software by Edwin on September 25, 2009

In our under-development  project – Writing Outliner, the outliner is one of the  main parts of the writing software, it turns Microsoft Word™ into a true outliner software.

So what is a outliner

Well, the word outliner in the Windows world is not used as widely as it’s in the Mac world,  but you must be familiar with the similar words: folders, tree or hierarchy, right? The following are some examples of using a outline to manage information:

• Microsoft Office Outlook uses folders to organize emails into groups.
• Windows Explorer uses folders to manage all your files in your computer.
• Scrivener, the famous book writing software for Mac uses a outliner to manage all documents in a book writing project.
• Evernote, the famous note taking software uses hierarchical treeview to manage the notes it clipped.

Why outliners are so useful?

With a hierarchical outline view, you can view and manage the information at a larger scale without going into the details, this make it easier to get an overview and take control of the structure of a large amount of information.

Why Microsoft Word™ needs a outliner?

Let’s take writing a book as an example, with an outline view you can view and manage the book chapter by chapter, if you have ever written a book with Microsoft Word™ without the help of other software you should know the pain when navigating such a long document to find something for amendment.

How Writing Outliner™ differs from other outliner softwares?

1. Writing Outliner is specifically designed for writers, outlining is only one of the main features of it, and there are other many features such as full text search, index cards, tagging, writing-task-related document properties, second viewer for viewing research materials, taking notes, and so on, for making the writing process smoother and easier.
2. It’s seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Word™, so you can make good use of the industry leading word processor.

Note: Writing Outliner is currently under development and it’ll be come a versatile writing software  for writers, if you are interested you please sign up our newsletter so that you can get informed when it’s ready (for beta testing or purchasing).