A Software Ecosystem for Research, Zettelkasten Note-Taking, and Writing [UNDER DEVELOPMENT]

As mentioned in the "roadmap" page of this guide, you can start drafting your manuscript within Obsidian. At some point when your writing is very well along, you may want to transfer your manuscript from Obsidian to Word. See the box below concerning how to do this.

Another option is to use Obsidian to develop your ideas and record notes but to use Word, in tandem, as the place to draft your manuscript from the very outset. 

Note that a drawback with the latter approach is that you have to go back and forth between two softwares, but that consideration is not decisive for you, decide how you want to proceed by comparing the strengths of Obsidian and Word:

Obsidian:

• can create links and backlinks to other notes to exploit the ability to find connections between ideas and therefore discover new ones (see Zettelkasten page of the guide)
• need not clutter a manuscript with notes as work on the manuscript; can just link out to notes including literature and permanent notes.

Word:

• can use citation management software plug-in to format a paper.

Note: both enable outlining within a document; see here re. Obsidian's outlining feature;  scroll down here to see the video about Using Headers in Microsoft Word When Writing.

This page suggests a simple procedure for handling uncomplicated documents:

• Export the Obsidian note to PDF.
• Open the note in Word.
• Save the Word document.

You may want to explore use of a plugin if simpler procedures (e.g., above) do not work in the way you want. Look around on the web for relevant plugins or other techniques for converting from Obsidian to Word. Keep in mind however the Obsidian caveat about use of plugins below.  Contact the help desk with questions about the security issues involved with plug-ins