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5 handy tips for using Ulysses

How to get stats, share texts and more.

Ulysses: Writing App

Write a novel, story, book

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Writing app Ulysses has many features to make your work easier, including the ability to include attachments and export sheets into different formats. We’ve put together some tips to help you along the way.

1. See your stats

How many pages does your novel have so far? Does the length of your assignment correspond with its guidelines? Should you shorten your speech to observe the time frame? Ulysses’ statistics deliver answers to all of these questions. Click the Gauge icon on the top right and examine characters with or without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs, pages – even reading time.

Want to estimate how long it’d take to read your text? Click the Gauge icon to find out.

2. Favourites at your fingertips

Your Ulysses library gets crowded if you produce a lot of sheets. By using File > Add to Favorites (or pressing Command-D) in the menu bar, you can mark a text as a favourite, labelled with a star in the sheet list. Your favourites appear in the smart group of the same name at the top of the Library pane.

Mark sheets you’re working on as favourites and find them quickly.

3. Attach relevant references

If you have materials (written notes, links, images, a PDF file) that belong to your text, but not in the text itself, you can attach them. Open a sheet’s attachments via the paperclip button on the top right. They’re always within reach in case you need them and hiding them again is just as easy.

Attachments are an easy way to save reference files.

4. Share with style(s)

What if you want to share your text with others? Ulysses offers export options that cover any writer’s needs. You can choose between styles for different outputs; one look for PDFs and another for Word documents for example. Launch the Quick Export panel via the Share icon on the top-right corner and click Preview. In the Preview window you can toggle between output formats and text styles.

Ulysses comes with a selection of export styles, ranging from modern to classic layouts. More styles can be downloaded from its website.

5. Blogging made easy

Bloggers will enjoy Ulysses’ WordPress publishing function. From within the app, you can upload posts to your WordPress blog, complete with images, formatting and tags. To do so, choose Publishing as the format in the Quick Export panel. For the first time, you’ll need to enter your account details to connect Ulysses with your blog.

Connect with Wordpress to publish posts right from within Ulysses.

From then on, publishing your posts is straightforward. During upload, you can set a publishing date, change the slug and more. Finish the process with Ulysses, or upload the post as a draft and preview it on your blog.