Have you ever sat through a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster or a dreary TV drama and thought to yourself: “I could do better than that”?

Well, simple as it sounds, translating even the best ideas into a script can be a frustrating experience, especially if you don’t have prior experience. There are some surprisingly strict formatting rules to contend with, for a start. Even if you’re familiar with basic storytelling techniques, it can be all too easy to start losing the plot.

Movie Outline bills itself as ‘professional’ screenwriting software but, in truth, it’s as useful for novices as it is for seasoned professionals. On one hand it’s effectively a specialised word processor with all the industry-standard formatting tools required to write scripts. On the other, it’s an extremely useful program for planning and structuring individual components of a programme or film, such as the story, characters and so on.

Movie Outline works by splitting the project into a series of ‘steps’, each containing one or more scenes. A tabbed toolbar across the top of the page provides access to the different ways of viewing and building each step.

You can write an outline for a specific chunk of the story, analyse your script as a set of on-screen flash cards, develop the characters that appear in a specific step or work on the dialogue itself.

For first-timers, templates can provide tried-and-tested story structures to build upon and it’s even possible to run direct ongoing comparisons with similar proven scripts from various genres, including Die Hard and When Harry Met Sally.

Movie Outline isn’t going to magically produce a million-dollar screenplay in the same way that Microsoft Word can’t conjure up an entire novel in a few clicks. It’s not cheap, either, so you need to be certain that you want to make the investment before you buy.

But if you’re serious about learning to write scripts, then Movie Outline is a lot cheaper than booking yourself onto a screenwriting course at film school. And, while there are similar, alternative packages available, we haven’t seen one that’s as straightforward, helpful and complete as this.