I have a finished manuscript that I wrote in Word. I purchased Scrivener for its compile to Kindle feature as well as using it for future manuscripts. Could someone please steer me in the right direction as to how to import the manuscript into Scrivener? From what I learned in the tutorial, it is best to copy and paste into Wordpad to strip it of any formatting. Then move it to Scrivener.
My tentative plan is to copy and paste one chapter at a time into Scrivener making each chapter a new document. Or should I create a folder for each chapter with one text document in it? I do not have sections or parts in the manuscripts, just chapters. I think that how I import it into Scrivener will make compiling it either easier or more difficult. Can anyone comment? I don’t want to spend hours only to find out down the road a different method would have been much more efficient. Thanks for any help!
If you want to strip out all existing formatting before importing to Scrivener, I would use Windows Notepad rather than WordPad, because Notepad is a plain text editor which will ignore all formatting. WordPad supports RTF so I imagine there is a risk that some of your formatting will remain intact. (I might be wrong, of course, but it strikes me that the possibility is there.) Anyhow, Notepad will definitely do what you want, because it only handles plain text.
Other than that, your plan seems sound. It’s really a matter of choice how you divide the manuscript, but since at this stage you only want to compile it, rather than work on it further, it sounds sensible to put each chapter in a separate document as you suggest. If you aren’t grouping chapters into parts, or subdividing them into sections, then I can’t see what you would gain by adding folders to the structure. You can use compile settings to generate chapter headings, autonumbering and so on for these documents even without enclosing folders.
Personally, I would copy the manuscript out of Notepad and paste it into a single Scrivener document in the first instance (assuming that it is currently held in a single Word document), because this cuts down the amount of to-ing and fro-ing between programs. I would then split the manuscript into its component chapters from within Scrivener, using Documents > Split > At Selection (Ctrl+K) or Documents > Split > with Selection as Title (Ctrl+Shift+K) as appropriate, and remembering to name each new document as I create it.
In essence, though, it sounds as though you are definitely on the right track. Good luck!
Thanks, Siren, for your advice. I appreciate it!
Not to denigrate Scrivener’s abilities in any way, but if you save your Word document as HTML, and then run it through Calibre, you can get a very nice Kindle file.
I would follow the Smashwords formatting guide before saving to HTML, as it yields superior formatting in the Kindle format.
Calibre
http://calibre-ebook.com/
-and-
Smashwords Style Guide
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52
I am new to Scrivener, but really, really like it for doing my actual writing. I’ve imported a bunch of chapters from Word, and am continuing to work in Scrivener.
Thanks, Marilynx, I do need any helpful suggestions. People like you keep people like me from pulling out all their hair. 
I do not like all the little technical considerations that seem to pile on with the conversion to an ebook.