I see by email that Edwin Yip has revived his original project, WritingOutliner, a plug-in for Microsoft Word. He had originally set WritingOutliner aside to develop DocxManager.

Now, both projects will be under active development.

If I were a Word user, one of these utilities would be in my daily use arsenal. Cool stuff.

@Amontillado,

Thanks for spreading the words!

For people who want to see the new screenshots: http://writingoutliner.com/writing-software/blog/writingoutliner-2-0-released/

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@Edwin: And what exactly is the difference between DocxManager and WritingOutliner 2.0?

Franz Grieser wrote:

@Edwin: And what exactly is the difference between DocxManager and
WritingOutliner 2.0?

Hi Franz,

Both WritingOutliner and DocxManager were developed for the same goal - project-based writing with Word.

UI
===
However, the two are different designs:
- WritingOutliner is a so-called 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
===
- 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.

Hope it's clear.

Thanks. That makes things clearer.

WritingOitliner was an add-in with apparently unsolvable stability issues. So ... after abundant complaints about disappearing/garbled text and lost entire documents, DocxManager was created; which used a different approach to the same issue.

The goal of this app is to (essentially) simulate a two-pane outliner within Word. Seemed like a good idea to me, until -- across a bunch of versions -- it still continued to spindle and mutilate my work.

Would I ever let ANY of this developer's programs anywhere near any of my machines: (And I can't emphasize this strongly enough) Hell no. And if you were ever one of Yip's victims, you'd probably agree with me. Maybe he's turned into a programming genius over the years, but what he did to his users was absolutely unforgiveable, imo.

Franz Grieser wrote:

@Edwin: And what exactly is the difference between DocxManager and
WritingOutliner 2.0?

@Listerene,

Thanks for your comment and I'm sorry for the issues caused. I did received such complaints, but it's not abundant, although I must admit you are not alone.

Sorry, software have bugs and I'm sorry that the bug of my software cause this inconvenience to you. It's definitely my problem.

There were already fixes for the issue, and my next focus of WritingOutliner development will be a thorough checking and fixing of this issue.

I'm already drafting a new method for storing the raw Word documents as a copy in the file system, maybe plus a new versioning system if possible.

I'll try my best to improve the stability of WritingOutliner and I will print out this thread and tick it on the wall of my office so that It'll keep reminding me the importance of stability of a software.

Thanks Listerene. I understand and accept what you said.