Hello,
I am creating a manual for my corporation. One of the things it requires is a certain format and look. We are currently using Excel specifically for its use of cells and columns.
I don’t want to use Excel based on past experiences of data corrupting and losing all the work.
I have been told that “we can’t use Scribner because it’s not for making a manual like we want.”
Is there a simple way to create columns and tables in Scribner so that I can move this project away from a corruptible file?
Creating tables is simple. Adjusting them to work correctly is a bit more involved. But Scrivener’s tables do NOT act like Excel or Word tables. They accept what you put in them. They self-adjust for height and width, some, but they are not perfect, and often need manual adjusting. And whatever you do with them in the editor might not come out like that in the compiler.
ALL files are corruptible. Doesn’t matter what program made them.
The computing world often uses checksums and hashes and verification of those, to make sure files have not been corrupted, and if they have been, to at least know about it and go back to the last good backup.
However, a free trial is available, so you can at least see if it will do what you need. And $40 for a copy of the software isn’t a bad price; I’m sure someone at your company can use it, and perhaps they’ll see that it CAN do those things. Or not.
Many users don’t use Scrivener for final output, either. They often shift their final output from Scrivener into something like QuarkXpress, Indesign, Scribus, or Microsoft Publisher, for further organization and pretty-formatting of the contents. Could even shift it into Excel, I suppose.