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Outliner

The Outliner is a spreadsheet view of a book's chapters, one row per chapter, with sortable, inline-editable columns. It's the tabular counterpart to the card-based Storyboard: the Storyboard is for visual pacing, the Outliner for scanning and bulk-tweaking metadata across the whole book at once.

What it offers

The Outliner lays out every chapter as a table. At a glance you see how long each chapter is, what status it has, and whether it meets its word target. Several fields can be edited right in the table, without opening each chapter one by one.

Opening the Outliner

In a prose book, click the Outliner button in the chapter sidebar. The URL flips to ?view=outline, so you can deep-link or use the browser back button to return to the editor. The Back to editor button in the top left also returns you to the editor.

Columns

Column Editable Notes
# no The chapter's position.
Title no Click it to open that chapter in the editor.
Words no Live word count; highlighted when the chapter meets its target.
Target yes Per-chapter word target. An empty field means no target.
Status yes Drafting status (To Do / First Draft / Revised / Final).
Label yes One of the book's labels.
Beat yes Story beat (Setup to Resolution).

All edits save instantly (the same optimistic-locked save as the Storyboard and the editor).

How to use it

  1. Open the Outliner with the Outliner button.
  2. To open a chapter, click its Title, the editor opens on that exact chapter.
  3. To set a word target, click the Target field, type a number and leave the field. Clear it to remove the target again.
  4. To change Status, Label or Beat, pick the value in that row's select.
  5. Click a column header to sort by it.

Sorting

Click a column header to sort by it; click again to reverse. A small arrow shows the current sort direction. You can sort by position (default), title, word count, target, or status, useful for, say, finding the shortest chapters or grouping everything still marked To Do. Sorting is a view only; it never changes the chapters' actual order.

Where to find it

The Outliner is available for prose books (with chapters). The Outliner button sits in the editor's chapter sidebar.

Tips

  • Sort by Status to see at a glance what is still left to do, and by Words to spot unusually short or long chapters.
  • The word-count highlight is a handy check on whether a chapter has met its target, without opening it.
  • Use the Outliner for bulk metadata upkeep and the Storyboard for visual planning, both work on the same chapters.