AuthorLink places Word manuscripts and Excel spreadsheets into styled, editable stories with a live link. When the source changes, one click merges it in — your styling and edits stay put, and real conflicts are preserved as review notes.
Every book production team knows the loop: the manuscript changes after layout has started, and someone has to re-import it and redo hours of styling — or merge every edit by hand. AuthorLink's three-way merge ends that loop.
Their edits flow into your story — paragraph styles, bold/italic/underline, small caps, colors and the rest of your formatting are preserved.
Your edits are kept, and you can push them back into the Word file at any time — footnotes, tables and images included.
The author's content wins, your formatting wins — and a Story Note preserves your version so nothing is ever silently lost. A full change review shows exactly what happened in every merge.
Manuscripts, data and layout — kept in step without anyone waiting on anyone.
Place any .docx, .xlsx or plain-text file as a styled story with a dynamic link (⌘⇧D). Built-in import filters — Microsoft Office not required.
Spreadsheets place as tables with a one-way merge: format and edit cells locally while new data from the sheet flows in. Cell-by-cell merging keeps both.
Tables import as editable tables, footnotes and endnotes travel with the story and merge by note, inline images come along — and all of it exports back to Word.
A three-way merge (⌘⇧U) integrates external changes while preserving your styling — including independent insertions and deletions on both sides. Update All merges every changed link at once.
After every merge, a review panel lists exactly what came from the external file, what local work was kept, and where conflicts were resolved.
Push your story edits back into the linked Word document, or export any story as a fresh, automatically-linked .docx. Link to Original retroactively links existing stories to files.
Real conflicts never vanish: both versions are captured as dismissible notes, anchored to the paragraph, table cell or footnote where they happened.
Native macOS editing with ⌘B/⌘I/⌘U, strikethrough, small caps, super/subscript, text color, a paragraph-style picker, undo and find. Double-click any table to edit it in a grid.
Decide exactly how Word paragraph styles map to AuthorLink styles — per document, applied on every place and update.
RequirementsmacOS 14 Sonoma or later. Universal binary — runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
