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Kudos for WritingOutliner Word Add-in
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Posted by dan7000
Mar 4, 2011 at 08:58 PM
In a previous thread, I mentioned that I tried the WritingOutliner Word Add-in but could not get it to work: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2364.
A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded an updated version of the add-in, and it has been working great. I purchased the full version and have used it for 2 writing projects in the past week, and I am hugely impressed. I will definitely make lots of use of this for writing projects going forward. Here are the key things that I like about it:
- It doesn’t force any particular workflow: it’s basically a way to organize a bunch of short word documents into outlines, keeping all your research, snippets of drafting, and final drafts in one place.
- You can export one branch of an outline into a word document, and the outline titles become word headings, preserving indentation level and using Word’s heading styles. The text of each outline item becomes body text.
- The search function is fantastic. The search result appears in the outline pane, and it shows the context of each search hit (like google) but also preserves the outline structure, so you can easily notice what branch your search hits appear in.
- There is a tabbed interface so you can open documents or outlines in multiple tabs in the right pane, which is nice for quick copying and pasting.
A few downsides:
- no way to copy outline items or branches. I need this so that I can save an old version of a branch before I make changes.
- still some stability problems. save your work if you use this one, because Word will be crashing (on the upside, it has its own auto-save which seems to be more reliable than Word’s).
For those who have compared WritingOutliner to Scrivener—in the Windows world, there is absolutely no comparison. Scrivener Windows is not usable for professional writing, since it does not support anything more than very basic text formatting and has no paragraph styles. Also, the compile function in Scrivener does not export Word-compatible headings or paragraph styles, so there is no way to turn a document from Scrivener into a properly-formatted Word doc without completely re-formatting every paragraph one at a time. (For those who prefer some other word processor, the same thing would be true: you cannot go from Scrivener to finished product without a ton of reformatting.)
Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 9, 2011 at 03:00 PM
I’m also giving Writing Outliner a thorough test and I’m not as positive about it as Dan. I’m looking at it as an option to move my main reference work (about 1600 pages if printed) out of Whizfolders - I would like to use the better layout and table manipulation abilities of Word.
It is a young program, and that’s clear from some of its annoying idiosyncrasies (such as needing to click on a document in the tree twice to get its focus), but it’s its speed and ability to handle large documents which are causing problems for me. It takes about 20 x as long to load or save a document as Whizfolders (I presume it’s opening/saving the whole document each time rather than just each modified section), and compiling a large file into a single Word document (my current test is only about half the size I will finally need) takes “hours”.
I agree that it has a lot of promise, but I don’t feel confident about entrusting any valuable information to it just yet.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 9, 2011 at 05:02 PM
Ah, I’d have a suggestion there, Graham - much faster and more efficient than Office for handling very large documents is SoftMaker Office, which also has some astonishingly good Word filters (http://www.softmaker.com). It’s actually the same as Ashampoo Office, so can be obtained very cheaply (better still, the licence is for three users, not just one).
I have quite a lot of experience of SoftMaker Office, and the latest version 2010 is very impressive. It’s extremely stable, and very fast and efficient even when the documents you’re producing are enormous. A couple of years ago the German Government ran tests on a number of office suites, including MS Office 2003 and OpenOffice, and concluded that SoftMaker Office was (a) faster and more stable, especially when handling large documents, and (b) better at importing/exporting MS Office files. I’d say that still holds true now.
You’ll find the Ashampoo version on http://www.ashampoo.co.uk; the only thing it’s missing is the scripting support, I believe. Otherwise you can buy directly from SoftMaker.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 9, 2011 at 05:39 PM
Thanks for that! It’s been a few years since I’ve used any Ashampoo products, so I downloaded it to test. My reference work has always crashed every word processing program I’ve ever tried it in except Word (which is why I cut it up into bits in Whizfolders), so I was curious. In a completely unscientific test I opened the document (1600 complex pages, 160000 words) in Word in 50 seconds. I tried in Ashampoo TextMaker - it attempted to import for over 4 minutes, then just stopped.
So no joy for me there, at least for that file ....
Posted by dan7000
Mar 9, 2011 at 07:51 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>I’m also giving Writing Outliner a thorough test and I’m not as positive about it as
>Dan. I’m looking at it as an option to move my main reference work (about 1600 pages if
>printed) out of Whizfolders - I would like to use the better layout and table
>manipulation abilities of Word.
>
>It is a young program, and that’s clear from some of
>its annoying idiosyncrasies (such as needing to click on a document in the tree twice
>to get its focus), but it’s its speed and ability to handle large documents which are
>causing problems for me. It takes about 20 x as long to load or save a document as
>Whizfolders (I presume it’s opening/saving the whole document each time rather than
>just each modified section), and compiling a large file into a single Word document
>(my current test is only about half the size I will finally need) takes “hours”.
Yeah, I would not recommend this for use as a knowledgebase or for storing lots of information for future reference. I never compile the entire project since most of the text in my project is for reference only, and the final compiled writing product is in the range of 25 pages, not 1600. So, for me, compiling is nearly instantaneous.
WritingOutliner doesn’t appear to easily provide a page count in each folder, but it does have the nice feature of providing a word count for every folder. Here are some stats about my current project, which performs pretty fast in Word 2003:
- “Drafts” folder (has the final output in it): 3732 words
- “Research” folder, with 6 subfolders, each containing outlines and full text of source material: 550529 words.
So I think, in total, I have considerably more text than you have (I think you said 160000 words). Here is some data on performance:
- Opening the project takes 14 seconds
- Opening an individual document within the project takes 4 seconds for a 2-page document, and 6 seconds for a 245-page document
You say that your documents are “complex.” I wonder if that could be the difference? My documents only contain rich text - very few embedded pictures or other objects.
>
>I
>agree that it has a lot of promise, but I don’t feel confident about entrusting any
>valuable information to it just yet.