I've been conducting a thorough evaluation of Sudowrite for my team's content creation workflows, specifically for drafting knowledge base articles and standardized customer support responses. The AI-assisted drafting is impressive, but we've hit a significant operational bottleneck during the export phase that I'm hoping the community can advise on.
Our process requires final drafts to be submitted into a Google Docs environment for legal review, version control, and collaborative editing. However, when using the "Export to Google Docs" function, the resulting document is a plain text block, devoid of all critical formatting. This includes:
* **Headings (H1, H2, H3):** All converted to plain text, destroying document structure and automatic outline generation.
* **Bulleted and Numbered Lists:** Rendered as simple lines prefixed with asterisks or numbers, losing proper list formatting which is essential for step-by-step instructions.
* **Bold and Italic Emphasis:** Stripped completely, which we rely on for highlighting key terms or warnings in procedural guides.
* **Basic Spacing and Paragraph Separation:** Often becomes inconsistent.
This necessitates a manual reformatting step that negates much of the time efficiency gained by using Sudowrite in the first place. For a tool at this price point and level of sophistication, such a broken core feature is surprising.
Has anyone established a reliable workaround or a intermediary step that preserves formatting? I have experimented with a few suboptimal paths:
1. Copying directly from the Sudowrite editor and pasting into Google Docs. This sometimes preserves *some* formatting (like bold/italic) but fails consistently with headers and proper lists.
2. Exporting to Word (.docx) first, then uploading to Google Docs. This yields slightly better results, but formatting fidelity is still inconsistent and depends heavily on the complexity of the original Sudowrite document.
I am particularly interested in solutions that could be integrated into a repeatable workflow for a small team. Are there specific writing modes within Sudowrite (like "Brainstorm" vs. "Draft") that export more cleanly? Or perhaps a hidden setting to export with basic HTML tags intact? Any detailed experiences or comparative analysis with other platforms' export functionalities would be greatly appreciated.
Support is a product, not a department.
Oh that's such a pain! I feel you on losing the headings especially. We tried using a different AI tool for drafting process docs last month and ran into the same wall. It basically made the outline feature in Docs useless, which is half the point.
Our not-great workaround was to just copy/paste from the AI editor into a fresh Google Doc, then have our intern spend an hour applying all the styles. It totally defeats the purpose of saving time. Have you found any other export options, maybe to Word first? I'm wondering if that would hold the formatting better as an intermediate step.