Let’s imagine the following situation: You write a seminar paper in WriteFlow and you include this great quote you’d like to reuse in an article. So, as you already used the quote once, it has been automatically saved with all the relevant information for the footnote and the bibliography.
While you write your new article you notice this typo in your original transcription of the quote. Instead of going back to the original text and probably even to another program you used before to manage your bibliography and quotes, just change it in the new text.
In WriteFlow, no matter where you’re working on a quote (or any other type of text), you don’t work on a copy but the original. So you just change it directly in the text of the article once and it will be changed everywhere.
You might want to raise your hand at this point: There are many reasons you wouldn’t want your text changed everywhere at once, especially not in documents which aren’t even open at the moment.
We came up with the following solution: Versions. Every element in our Database can have as many versions as you want. If you change the quote to correct a typo, you’re asked if you want to change it also at the other occurrences of the element, which will be shown to you on the screen.
If it was just a small correction, you might want to apply it everywhere. But if you want at this point just a shorter version of the quote, you’ll obviously keep the longer version in the old text and for further use.
Now, to keep track of all the versions of an element, you’ll just have to look into the inspector, or, even better, you just use the small arrows that show up on the left side of every element with a version.
With the help of these arrows you can just switch easily and inside your text between the available versions to chose the best one for this text.
Obviously, next time you look up the quote, you’ll see a list of the uses you made not only of one, but of all existing versions.