Writing Outliner for MS Word Soon on BitsDuJour

Posted by Dr Andus
Aug 2, 2013 at 03:06 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:
>As I mentioned, it allows me to handle massive documents in Word.
>Opening a 2500 page document in Word, moving to the right place and
>making edits is slow and annoying. With WO I have split each chapter
>into a seperate “document” within WO, which I can then open and edit
>quickly and easily. When I want to output the full document, I can
>compile all the individual documents into one big one. That’s what it
>does for me.

There are two elephants in the room. The one is Word, the other is Scrivener for Windows.

1) Why use Word at all, if Word can’t even handle its own files when they get big?

2) How does Word Outliner compare to Scrivener? The last time I looked at both, Scrivener appeared to have more going for it.

Of course the utility of both depend on one’s workflow as well. As a writer, I’ve decided to separate the writing process and the formatting process. I still use Word for formatting as the very last stage, but otherwise I prefer to use single-pane outliners with inline notes that allow me to write fast (and I don’t find writing in either Scrivener or Word fast enough).

By “fast” I mean the least possible delay in typing, copying and pasting, scrolling through a large document, jumping from section to section, collapsing and expanding sections, moving sections around, without the thing crashing on me or telling me to wait…

I realise that some other workflows may require the use of Word at an earlier stage of the process (but personally I’d try to eliminate those and delay getting involved with Word until the latest possible stage).