Storybook, A Writing Software Review

Recently I have been trying out some different writing software. I don't want to pay a lot (don't have the budget and have a hard time justifying it when Microsoft Word will do). So I wanted to start with software that was free, or had a free version.

Thus Storybook. There is a pro version, but I only used the free version. Here are my thoughts:

The Good
-I liked how I could put everything into one place - my outline, characters, the actual manuscript text.
-While you are working on your scene, you can always see the description of the chapter - very helpful for keeping on track.
-You can divide your novel into parts, chapters, and scenes.
-You can enter items - something I had never thought about doing.
-You can assign scenes to different chapters - or un-assign them. This is great for keeping deleted scenes.
-There is decent, built in spell checking.

The Bad
-There is no word count feature (that I could find). Which means I had to copy and paste into word to get a word count.
-The free version does not have export options, so again - copy and paste into word.
-There are adds that take up a good chunk of the screen space. They aren't very annoying, just take up space.
-There seemed to be a lot of features I did not use. Maybe if I continued using it I would have explored those.

Conclusion
The next writing software that came on my radar was yWriter. I recently downloaded it and ported everything I had in Storybook over. Personally I am liking yWriter better already. So although Storybook was nice, I probably won't go back to it.

However, if you are looking for a writing software with quite a few nice features - I would give the free version a try and see if it fits your style.