Is there an online tool which supports shared writing?
I want to write a short story (and maybe later a book) together with a colleague from work.
Is there an online service which we can use to do this in a convenient way?
Useful features would be (not all necessary):
- write at the same time and immediately see what the other one is changing
- see latest updates from the other writer highlighted
- manage tasks (maybe in a kanban board)
- manage timelines like upcoming deadlines
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Another alternative (if you are not afraid to use LaTeX) would be Overleaf. While a learning curve exists you can layout documents beautifully with it.
I come from an engineering background where special characters and formulas are needed on a regular basis. We used Overleaf within our team to work on several parts of our document simultaneously.
Not for simultaneous work on one document, but maybe of interest for you: should you get off the grid for some reason, you can use offline editors like TeXstudio to continue working on your files. Once you get back online, you would still have to carefully merge stuff together, but there won't be many bad surprises in regards to formatting.
EDIT: I missed some of your points, sorry.
You can see where your colleague is working (there is a visible cursor) and who is logged in atm. I do not recall any other highlighting, though.
You can leave comments within the text visible for everyone working on the document - this might offer you the task management functionality without overburdening you with yet another tool.
As for deadlines... I did not notice any tracking functionality in Overleaf. I would personally use Gantt charts to organize myself, including milestones and the like. GanttProject offers everything I need, only used it offline though. But if you put the project files into some secure cloud storage or inside a git repository, it may suit your needs.
EDIT2: As Eric Lino pointed out in the comments, there can only be two people working on the document if you are using the free version (source: pricing list).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45383. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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This sounds like Google Docs, perhaps combined with Trello (for the Kanban board and calendar view), would do for you.
It's got live updating -- I don't think it tracks edits by author exactly, so you could agree on a convention -- like my students on one team devised a rule where each of them owned 2 colors. (4 students, so like light blue and dark blue was one, red and pink was another, etc.) Anything NEW they would do in one of their colors. Any EDITS to others' work, they'd do in their edit-color. (They copied original sentence to comments, in case people wanted to compare.) They would comment each paragraph with "ok" if they had no changes. Their teamleader would turn paragraphs BLACK if everyone had said "ok".
Since it's only 2 of you, that part could be simpler.
If you want to stay in Google things, you could fake a KanBan with Google Sheets, just name your columns, and each spreadsheet Cell becomes an Item, which you can move through the process. And then Google Calendar of course also exists for deadlines or blocking out time to write.
But Trello is free to use and lets you link to Gdocs also, so that's probably a better Kanban/Deadline solution.
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