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Importing and exporting word documents

I love the concept of Causality it is exactly what I have been looking for to handle complex plotting and multi threaded stories. However can you advise when the importing from and exporting to Word DOCX will be available?

thanks

Cathy

46 comments

46 Comments

gretasgreens04s

Mar 22

I'm also a big fan of Causality, and I'm glad to see someone else who appreciates its capabilities.

kbkhan4802

Mar 21

Hey there, Cathy! Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.

Also, if you're dealing with text in your Word documents, Smart Engines OCR could be a helpful tool to recognize and extract text from images. It might be worth checking out if you need to work with OCR content in your documents.

kbkhan4802

Mar 18

Apologies for the late response. As for importing from and exporting to Word DOCX, I'm not sure when that feature will be available. However, one option could be to use a third-party tool to convert your Word documents to a compatible format, such as PDF or RTF, before importing them into Causality.

Per Holmes

Mar 18

Replying to

Hi,

That has been out for some time. Behind the scenes, we use the www.cloudconvert.com API for direct DOCX import/export. If you don't want your text to go through a cloud service, you can import/export specially rigged Word HTML files, which work offline and produce identical results.

oskar 21

Feb 06

Hi all,

I have been a registered user for some time now and use Causality for plotting novels which I would like to finish using the authoring software Papyrusautor once the draft is complete. I just received and installed version 3.1.1 of Causality and would like to provide the following feedback:

The Export to Word (HTML) function does not work and the result is unreadable.
Export to Word (docx - file) works conditionally, only pure text.
The same applies to export/only text.
Import/Word, /Word HTML does not work.

What works as I imagine is Print to PDF, which I can also read into Word.

Thanks

os|<ar

Per Holmes

Feb 06

Replying to

Hi,

Location and beat text is the only "real" part of the document, which is what is exported. Everything else is meta-data, characters, lanes, tags, synopsis, that's all stuff "around" the script.

It's true that PDF has options to print some of this for review during development, but it's not expected that any of this is present in a final result for someone to read. Only the beat text, and locations, title pages and episode/act breaks are expect to be present in a screenplay. The rest is stuff inside Causality that helps you write.

It's possible that the Docx export can grow to have similar options has the PDF exporter. But this isn't quite a bug.

oskar 21

Feb 06

Replying to

Dear Per Holmes,

I am now facing the issue of having to transport my data between Causality and Papyrus Autor and back, as I do not want to give up either of these software solutions. I had hoped to use the export/import functionality for this purpose, as both programs can handle PDF, and neither seem suitable for automation processes. We'll see what can be done.

Regards, Os/<ar

Per Holmes

Feb 07

Replying to

To be fully honest, this is mostly a hopeless workflow, and it's not even about Causality and Papyrus. Unless programs think exactly the same about the data they're handling, same model, same everything, it's going to be super lossy to go between programs.

Screenwriting programs for example are all almost the exact same program, and you wonder why so many even exist. They think so identically about what a screenplay is that it's actually possible to go from one app to another. But vast amounts of what is in Causality has no representation in any other app. No one thinks in Beats, except possibly Scrivener. What's a Lane or a Research folder in Final Draft? Stuff like that.

Papyrus also thinks smaller more typically about the model of a story than Causality does, and that's even going to get worse as we add Emotion Tracking, Parallel Scripts, Dependency Graph, and much more. Every single time you try to round-trip, you're going to lose everything you've done in Causality except the text, like going from Photoshop to MS Paint and back to Photoshop.

You're going to have to choose, or keep the apps separate.

Jeff Donne

Feb 05

Great news! Thanks Per :)

Per Holmes

Feb 04

Hi, Word Import/Export is on the beta channel, and will roll out wide during the coming week.

Cathy Campbell

Feb 21, 2022

Awesome! Very excited about this 😄

Per Holmes

Feb 21, 2022

We think we're becoming ready for the alpha this week. But a little kink has arisen of something we have to refactor now. Besides that, we only have to do the document upgrader and some of the videos, which indicates that we're close to the end.

Cathy Campbell

Feb 21, 2022

Good news Per, can’t wait to see v3.0. Any ETA on when we will see it?

cheers

cathy

Cathy Campbell

Feb 21, 2022

Ah thanks Jeff, good to know!

cathy

Per Holmes

Feb 21, 2022

We just need to get 3.0 out and stable, and this is one of the only things that will be allowed to get in front of collaboration.

Jeff Donne

Feb 21, 2022

While I can't wait for the Word export function too, I've found it works ok to export as HTML and then open with Word. It seems to carry across all the formatting, indents, chapter headings etc. The only thing I need to change are the margins, which is a two second job. Totally awesome program!

Per Holmes

Jan 20, 2022

That's great, so that could be an option in the import dialog. Super tip!