Setting up both apps for actual reporting use
Typed and Craft both look polished at first, but if you’re trying to write structured reports — like real ones, not just pretty one-pagers — things start to break down in different ways. I ran both on a live client project where I had to deliver weekly rollups, plus keep an internal team workspace viewable for async updates. So I wasn’t just testing them for looks. I actually had to live with one of them for three weeks.
Let’s start with Typed. Out of the box, Typed feels closer to traditional academic report writing — you get folders, references, and integrated PDF previewing, which sounds boring until you’re in the middle of a client sprint and need to find the right document before your meeting starts in 3 minutes. The big sell is the “Knowledge Base” thing — you can tag sources and sort them into a project layer that maps how docs relate to each other. It’s cool, but only useful if you already know you’re working on something layered.
Typed’s downside showed up fast though: there’s no wide document view. That sounds tiny — until it’s not. If I’m writing anything longer than a few paragraphs, I want full horizontal space. Craft nailed this. In Craft, your canvas expands, and you can use the cmd+click trick to edit two sections at once. Typed locks you into a narrow text column like you’re writing a blog post from 2008.
Now Craft is ridiculously clean. Buttons appear only as needed, and it feels zen. But then I needed to export a doc to hand off to a PM who didn’t use Craft. So I hit export as PDF. First time, it lost half the formatting. Second time, the font bloated like it was printed on legal paper. There is no way to control PDF export settings that I could find — not font, not margins. I tried pasting into a Google Doc and exporting that instead. Oof.
Working with live team input and edits
I brought in two editors to test speed of review. With Craft, you can tag people with @mentions, but sharing the actual doc requires them to create an account most of the time. You *can* generate a public link, but we had issues with permissions not updating. One external reviewer got blocked with a “You need access” screen even though I had the link set to ‘Can Edit’. This later turned out to be a browser cache issue, which… sure. :/
Typed was more predictable here. Everyone I invited via email got in, and there’s a nice document activity log that shows when a collaborator makes a change. What I didn’t realize: those updates sometimes show up with delay. Like, 5 minutes after someone said “I added a note under section three,” I still couldn’t see it. Turns out you have to hit the refresh arrow manually in the top right to force the sync. That’s annoying bordering on dealbreaker when you’re live-editing feedback.
Also, neither app does great with tracked changes. Craft lets you comment on text kind of like Google Docs, but you can’t accept or reject suggestions. You’re just left to mentally decide what to keep or delete. Typed doesn’t even support inline commenting unless you use the sticky note feature, which clutters fast. I ended up using a shared Slack thread to collect suggestions, and then manually re-editing the doc. That felt primitive.
Handling templates and reused document structures
Typed has project templates, which were okay. They let you start with a basic report scaffold: intro, body, conclusion, references. I hoped these would save me time… but customizing them is clunky. Once you edit a template, it detaches from the original, so you can’t reuse the changes easily. I made a weekly check-in template and then had to duplicate it like I was copying files in Dropbox from 2009. I ended up just bookmarking a completed version and copying from that repeatedly. Shrug.
Craft charmed me by letting me turn any page into a template with one click. That part ruled. I had a Report Template doc with sections for Summary, KPIs, Upcoming Tasks, Blockers — and could instantly duplicate it into new docs for each week. That saved actual time.
But here’s where Craft broke my heart a little: nesting. I wanted each report to live under a parent doc: “Client A Reports.” But inserting reports as subpages made them hide too deep — reviewers missed them. Placing them inline got messy fast. There’s no good way to batch-move or batch-edit nested documents. Craft says it’s a “block-based” editor, but that means every little thing becomes one draggable object you can accidentally move out of place. I once moved the whole Summary section into the footer without realizing.
Exporting final work for delivery or archiving
Exporting report files that actually *look* good is still weirdly hard in 2024. Typed gives you PDF and Word export, which I thought would be great — until I tried it. The PDF export compresses the entire doc into one skinny column with tiny font and zero page breaks where you’d expect them. It looked like an old website screenshot.
The Word export worked better, but lost all my header formatting and turned bullet points into plain paragraphs. I tried re-exporting twice with different options toggled, but it didn’t improve. I looked it up — seems like their Word exporter ignores block styles if you customized your font or layout even slightly. So yeah, cool.
Craft handled visual exports a little better *if* you were using their default styles. But — and this killed me — any colored callouts (like for Highlights or Blockers) were stripped to grayscale. I get it: exporting to ultra-portable formats means compromises. But clients kept asking, “Did something break with the colors?”
Eventually I used PDF from Craft for internal docs and pasted the final summary into Notion for stakeholders. That combination looked clean and prevented PDF weirdness — but it means Craft wasn’t end-to-end usable.
Trying to integrate these apps into other tools
Typed has zero native integrations. No Zapier. No Make. No URL-based API endpoints. I actually tried to push a new file from Typed into a Slack channel every time I updated the Weekly Report. My plan was:
1. Write or update the report
2. Click export
3. Use Hazel (Mac automation) to watch that folder
4. When new file appears, trigger a Shortcut to upload to Slack folder
It technically worked. But come on. That’s six steps and three workarounds for something that should be built-in. You can’t even use timestamps as dynamic fields inside Typed.
Craft surprised me here. They have partial integration with Zapier and a working public API. I built a zap that monitors new Craft docs with #report in title, then fires a webhook that posts it to our PM tool. The doc preview even renders in-line in Basecamp. That was one of the only smooth wins. 😛
But. And it’s a big but — Craft’s API token system is confusing. You need to create an integration, then activate it per user and scope, and even then it sometimes threw auth errors if you left it untouched for more than a couple hours. I wrapped it in a custom Python call and stored the refreshed token via Postman monitor. This took longer than it should’ve.
Writing longform content and not losing your mind
Typed’s auto-save is aggressive. It saves every keystroke, which sounds good… until you want to undo a few words, and discover that your undo history gets reset per section. I tried ctrl+Z expecting to jump back four paragraphs. Instead, it undid my last paste and then stopped. Nothing more. I legit thought I’d lost about half an hour of work before realizing I just needed to scroll and manually delete the repeat section. That’s unnecessarily stressful.
Craft deals with undo more gracefully, but has a habit of hiding things in collapsible blocks. One time I thought an entire section disappeared. I was about ready to write to support — but literally, it had just been accidentally dragged into a collapsed subpage. So yes, version history exists — but navigation is so abstract that it defeats the point.
Also, neither app warns you if you close the tab mid-edit. Chrome just lets it go. I would prefer a JS confirm dialog like Notion has if there are unsaved changes. I got into the habit of clicking into another page and back just to be sure it was synced.
Months from now I probably won’t remember which formatting bug broke me first. But I will remember getting up from the desk and muttering “this should have been easier.”
Formatting differences that become unexpectedly painful
Typed has minimal formatting. You get bold, italic, bullet points, and subheadings. That’s about it. There’s no way to insert a table without pasting from Excel or manually formatting with tabs. I tried to replicate a table from another report:
Summary Q1 Q2
Revenue 54K 63K
Burn 21K 19K
Craft rendered that perfectly with just paste. Typed scrambled the tab spacing and aligned everything left. Trying to manually add spacing with spaces broke markdown alignment.
Craft let me create simple tables inline and style them — including alternating row colors and text alignment. HOWEVER — tables in Craft take up the full width of the canvas, even if the contents are tiny. So you get a lot of white space.
More painful: headings. I used CMD+1, CMD+2, etc to create H1 / H2 hierarchy in both. Typed enforces a style sheet format — once you style a heading, it stays consistent. Craft lets you go rogue and change heading color, spacing, size. Which is fun for design, yes. But bad for consistency across multiple reports unless you’re very disciplined.
I had to do a find/replace run just to make sure all my subheadings in Craft used the same size.
Tables aside, the moment that really got me: I inserted a list of key dates in Typed. Wanted to bold the dates and leave the descriptions inline, like:
**June 1** – team meeting
**June 3** – deliver deck
Typed wouldn’t let me bold part of a bullet. Either everything bolded or nothing did. That’s it. That’s when I knew I was switching.