I’m wondering if this is possible or is it more of a feature suggestion? I do a lot of A-V script writing for video productions and sometimes that involves moving around a lot of cells on the table, moving Audio or Video description to different places, etc. (A-V scripts are done in a 2 or 3 column table).
I often do things like this in a spreadsheet since I can just move the cursor the cell I want and cut/paste to the new cell without highlighting anything, but I would prefer to keep everything in Scrivener. Is there someway to do the same thing in Scrivener?
I’m not aware of any nice tricks for treating a table like a spreadsheet. They just aren’t the same type of beast. Tables are more just a formatting construct, and weight selection and editing on content rather than cells. I.e. you don’t move the cells around, you move the text around within the cells. As for changing how it works, we don’t really have control over tables, we are just providing them through the text engine. Even small changes are essentially impossible, let alone fundamentally converting it to another type of tool, like a spreadsheet.
I’m not sure if this suggestion will help you out with the way you work, but you might want to check out Scrivener’s Outliner view, in conjunction with custom meta-data. It’s a way to kind of create a sort of very simple spreadsheet, but it operates at the binder item level, not within text files. Thus you would have one binder item for each row in the “table”. But, that would make it so you could freely drag rows around, just like you can organise files in the Outliner or binder, and tab between text entry cells in the Outliner if you add your custom meta-data as columns to it. This can be exported as a CSV to your spreadsheet program if you wish.
I’ve attached an example Scrivener project showing how you could organise and manage your shots in the Outliner, and have those values in the Outliner published into the table when you compile. The scene template has been modified to copy the custom meta-data values into the appropriate table columns. I have no idea if that will work the way you want, as I’m not super familiar with what the output should look like, but it seems to work fine with a few basic tests compiling to PDF. scripting_in_outliner.scriv.zip (123 KB)