Plenty of editors and beta readers work in Word. You can send them your manuscript as a .docx and, when the edited file comes back, merge the changes into your Writing Desk document. Writing Desk saves a copy of your previous version first, so you can always go back.
1. Export to Word
- Open your project or Writing Desk document.
- Open the menu (☰) at the left of the toolbar and choose Export.
- Choose Word (.docx) and save the file.
The exported file carries a hidden link to the Writing Desk document it came from, which is how Writing Desk recognises it later.
2. Send it out
Share the .docx however you usually would. Your editor can work in Word, or in Google Docs as long as they download it again as a .docx (File → Download → Microsoft Word).
Ask them to keep chapter titles as headings. If they use Word’s heading styles, your chapters come back exactly as they left.
3. Merge the edits back
- Save the edited .docx to your Mac.
- In Writing Desk, close the Writing Desk document you’re merging into, if it’s open.
- Open the edited .docx in Writing Desk.
- A bar appears above the text: This looks like an edited copy of your document. Click Merge….
- Check the details and click Merge.
Writing Desk replaces your document’s text with the edited version and opens it.
Merging by hand
If the bar doesn’t appear, for example because the file was renamed and saved by an app that drops Writing Desk’s link, you can choose the document yourself:
- Open the edited .docx in Writing Desk.
- At the bottom of the sidebar, click the project control and choose Merge into a Writing Desk document….
- Pick the Writing Desk document to merge into, then click Merge.
What carries over
| Comes back | Stays as it was in Writing Desk |
|---|---|
| All text changes | Alignment, first-line indents and font sizes |
| Headings that use Word heading styles | |
| Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough | |
| Lists, links and tables |
Comments you’d made in Writing Desk stay with the document but lose their place in the text, so you’ll find them in the comments sidebar rather than attached to a passage. Chapter variants stay with any chapter whose heading hasn’t changed.
Going back
Before every merge, Writing Desk saves a copy of the document as it was.
- In a project, the copy is in Version History, in the menu bar. Open it and restore it like any other version.
- For a Writing Desk document outside a project, the copy is saved inside the document itself. In Finder, Control-click the document, choose Show Package Contents, and open the pre-merge folder.