OneNote daily wordcount log powertoy request

[Marseille]

I absolutely love the way OneNote lets me organize my stories and their various parts. One thing I'd like to start doing is writing to meet word count goals. Although OneNote has a word count powertoy, 1) it only counts words on the page in front of it 2) no logging. This makes figuring how many words I added across multiple notebooks and folders so impractical as to be completely not worth it.

Any other OneNote users here? Any of you happen to be very talented and generous programmers as well? I know it's unlikely, but better to ask than not. I've posted in a few more Office/programming locations as well, but without any real enthusiasm about it, I suspect my only hope would be to find a programmer who was also a writer who was also a OneNote user.

I'm not exactly cash flush, but I would have no qualms about paying a reasonable price for the feature.

[kcmay]

My employer gave us a copy of OneNote with our Office Suite, and I was the only one in my group (of writers) who appreciated it. I just loved it! Sadly, we've moved to another version of Office and didn't get OneNote (plus, we got bought by another company, so we have to use the software the new parent company tell us to). I can't say I'm an expert user, but I did like it.

Have you tried yWriter? I'm using that for my current WIP but having a hard time getting used to it.

[Marseille]

Originally Posted by kcmay

Have you tried yWriter? I'm using that for my current WIP but having a hard time getting used to it.

Sadly, I'm a hopeless OneNote user. I actually have yWriter bookmarked, probably from another MR recommendation. It's probably where I got the word count log idea, but I like OneNote too much to change for any one feature. Thanks though.

[mukoan]

Just wanted to add my two cents here, for what it's worth. I've recently started using yWriter which has the ability to use an external RTF editor rather than the in-built one yWriter comes with. So what I've done is set another free program called focuswriter to be the default external RTF editor. What is so neat about this is that focuswriter has a very cool "daily goal" feature, (which can be based on word-count, or just the amount of time you've been writing for). It will remember the word-count across different documents. So say for example you have a daily word cound of 500 words, you can work on several different chapters throughout your yWriter project and focuswriter will keep tabs on how many words you've written in total for the day.

I find it extremely useful, (although it doesn't help me find time in the day to maintain my daily goal).

[James_Wilde]

Originally Posted by David Marseilles

Although OneNote has a word count powertoy, 1) it only counts words on the page in front of it 2) no logging. This makes figuring how many words I added across multiple notebooks and folders so impractical as to be completely not worth it.

David, two things strike me here: 1) I'm not a OneNote user since I'm now on a Mac, but I was impressed with it when I had a Windows machine, but I'm surprised that you have "multiple notebooks and folders" for one book. I would have thought that at least you could limit it to one notebook, although the multiple folders is understandable.

2) If you do limit yourself to one notebook, is there some way in OneNote to dump the whole lot to, say, Word and do your word count there? It's a sloppy workaround, but it might help.

Something else that might help: When I was still using Open Office for writing (I now use Scrivener) I had a spreadsheet on which I had figures for each chapter and a sum for the total. I assume that, in your book Notebook, one folder will be a chapter. When I'm writing the first draft, I keep to one chapter at a time, and I assume you do to, so it wouldn't be too hard to finish your chapter by doing a word count and posting the result to your spreadsheet, then open the next document/chapter and so on. This would give you a rough and ready figure.

And one final point: from the point of view of a writer, Scrivener is very like OneNote. It's now available for Windows (they call it a beta but my wife's copy feels very stable) and you can try it free (I think) until the first release is made. Why not give that a run? If you're not on Windows, it will apparently run in Wine on Linux, too.

[Marseille]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

David, two things strike me here: 1) I'm not a OneNote user since I'm now on a Mac, but I was impressed with it when I had a Windows machine, but I'm surprised that you have "multiple notebooks and folders" for one book. I would have thought that at least you could limit it to one notebook, although the multiple folders is understandable.

I don't have multiple notebooks and folder for one book. I keep a fairly large number of stories and story ideas in various stages of development, and they do cross multiple folders, and at the moment, notebooks, though that certainly isn't necessary, just how it happened. I could easily move the stories into a single notebook.

You can export to Word, and after looking at it just now, it looks you can even consolidate an entire notebook into one word document (and pdf, mht or xps). I don't know if OneNote (or Word) has a very flush command line repertoire, but if it did, I have the skills to script a nightly automated count. Might be a little more difficult to grab the outputted count and log it (perhaps the pdf format might useful there -- there are tons of odd pdf tools...oh, found one), but still I hadn't thought of that angle. Reps for the notion. Honestly, I don't mind doing a little work up front (eventually) if a set-it-and-forget-it setup is possible.

I do appreciate you guys tossing some suggestions my way. I'll look at scrivener as well, but again, my OneNote addiction is pretty hopeless.

[Marseille]

I am making strides on James' suggestion. I'm using autohotkey and the windows scheduler to automate saving the notebook to pdf, a freeware command line word count tool to count it, the DOS command line (via batch file) to save the output to a file. I still need to strip the output down the numbers alone and then save it to a csv file, which I can then view and compute daily word count in excel if nothing else. After that, I'll refine it to save monthly and yearly word counts in separate files.

It's a little work upfront, but since I've finally got some free time this month, I don't mind. Once it's finished it should be fairly trouble-free, set it and forget it, and that's all I care about.

I'm thinking about doing a 1 week (or month) something (short story, novella, novellete, depending on how brave I'm feeling) to try out the new system and get accustomed to seeing results off of it.