Guides for writing, presenting and working with data

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What a guide is for here

A guide answers how do I do this. Whether to change tools is a different question with its own pages, and mixing the two produces a tutorial you cannot trust and a comparison you cannot follow. So nothing on these four pages argues that you should switch to anything; where a limit is relevant it is named, and compare Tougather with your current tools is where that argument lives instead.

That constraint decides what goes in. A thesis guide that assumes a particular editor is useless to the person whose university hands them Word, so the thesis guide is about numbering, cross-references, citation styles and the state your supervisor needs the file in — things that are true in any tool and expensive to fix late in any tool. The offline guide covers Google Docs, Microsoft 365 and Notion before it says a word about this one, because for most readers the answer is about the tool they already have open.

Written against something that ran

The formulas guide is the clearest case. Every one of its twenty examples was executed against one small project of two tables, and the line printed under each formula is what the engine gave back — including the example that comes back wrong. There are 167 functions here, and nine are absent by design rather than missing: RAND, RANDBETWEEN, UNIQUE, SORT, FILTER, TRANSPOSE, INDIRECT, OFFSET and macros. Typing one gets a sentence explaining why rather than #NAME?.

The same rule applies where a guide touches the product. Citations come in four styles — APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago and Harvard — and a source parsed from a DOI or a BibTeX string flags the fields it inferred as uncertain, because the resolver never touches the network. A contents page is derived on every render and never stored, so it cannot disagree with the document. Page numbers go into the Word export and do not survive a browser print, because CSS margin boxes are unimplemented in every shipping engine. A guide is a bad place to find that out afterwards.

Nothing here is gated. The free plan has no login and no account, so every step in these guides can be followed without paying — which is just as well, since no one can pay yet: every Stripe price ID in the billing code is still null. A guide that only works after a purchase is an advertisement with steps in it.

The four guides

Each card ends with the one thing that guide settles — the sentence you would want to have read even if you never opened the rest of it.

• How to write a thesis, step by step

  Nine steps that each end in something another person can read, a chapter outline with a word goal per section, and twenty weeks laid out week by week. The last section is about handing the thing to a supervisor who wants Word with tracked changes, which is where most of the practical trouble actually is.

  What it settles: four settings — citation style, notes, a contents block, cross-references — cost ten minutes in week 1 or a weekend in week 19, and your first complete draft belongs in week 15 rather than week 19.

• How to build a pitch deck

  Twelve slides with one job each, in an order that is a proof chain rather than a convention: every slide answers the objection the one before it just raised. Then the mechanics — which sentence is printed and which stays in your mouth, the numbers investors ask about first, and rehearsing with a clock on a second screen.

  What it settles: a slide that answers no objection is not a short slide, it is a slide to cut — and the competition slide that works is the one naming where you lose.

• 20 spreadsheet formulas with examples

  SUM, SUMIF, COUNTIF, IF, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, TEXT, the date functions, PMT, NPV and CORREL, each with a formula that was executed against one small two-table project and the answer it gave back underneath it. The last section is the nine functions that are absent on purpose, with the reason for each.

  What it settles: row 1 of an address is the first row of data, so eight orders are E1:E8 and not E2:E9 — and three functions behave differently from Excel, one of which returns a wrong number rather than an error.

• How to keep working offline

  Offline is rarely a plane. It is a train through a tunnel or campus wifi that authenticates you and then forwards nothing. This sets out what Google Docs, Microsoft 365, Notion and Tougather each do about it, what a backup file actually contains, and what browser storage cannot promise.

  What it settles: in Google Docs and Notion, offline is a cached copy of something on a server, arranged before the connection went. Here the browser holds the original — and there is nothing on a server to fall back on.

If the question is whether, not how

Someone reading the offline guide on a train is usually asking a narrower question than someone deciding what their team should use next year. The second question is answered in every comparison in one place: Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Notion and Excel, each with a table where several rows are losses, and each ending in a tool somebody should keep.