One early review of WinScriv said that using a word processor was “like word diarrhoea on an endless sheet of literary loo roll.” Then I’d only ever used a word processor, and I wasn’t too used to Scrivener’s quirks. 3-4 months of Scrivener usage, and using a word processor is driving me crazy.
(Trying to convert a document to individual files, each which must be .doc. Since I don’t have word, that means saving the whole thing in .ODT and cutting and pasting. If anyone’s got an easier way to do it with LibreOffice or Open Office, I’d love to hear.)
How about saving it as RTF, importing it into Scrivener, and then splitting the document using the keyboard shortcuts? Once you are done doing that, you can Export (not compile, but a different menu option) all of the documents from Scrivener’s binder into individual files (in one go, not one-at-a-time).
This assumes that you don’t have to preserve any very specific formatting, tables, or other things that will get lost in the transition to Rich Text Format. Also, you should check that WinScriv has all of these functions implemented at this point before doing any major work.
Once you have a bunch of .RTF files, you can rename them to .DOC and that will work just fine. You might have to open them all up in word and then re-save them, but MS Word deals with that kind of workflow without much difficulty.
Maybe next time you can give this a try, or you could try it with just a couple of splits to see if it would be worth the effort later.
… but that last bit, about opening each file in Word may not be necessary. If you can convert from .doc to .odt format and then back to .doc, then surely you can convert to and from rtf with similar/the same tools. Right?
Anyway, unless this is something you do a lot, I guess this is nothing but a lot of wasted pixels, seeing that you’ve already accomplished the task.
Yours was a hell of a lot more steps than the one I took
Further, RTF and DOC are two completely different formats, and you can’t just change file extensions. Were that the case, Scrivener (at least for windows) would be able to convert into *.doc natively without the use of a third party program.
Why do you need to convert to .DOC? Do you really need to convert to .DOC? After all, Word opens .RTF files as easily as it does .DOCs with no loss of information from the RTF. And RTF was originally created by Microsoft anyway.
Is it that someone you’re sending the files to thinks they have to be in .DOC format? If that’s the case, then really it’s that those persons need educating about .RTF — when they have opened an .RTF file in Word, they wouldn’t know it was any different from a .DOC anyway.
As a side note, you can in fact pull the “rename .rtf to .doc” trick and launch the document in Word. The file extension rename is enough to fool Explorer, which uses the .doc association to launch Word. Word is smart enough to actually parse the format of the document its opening and handle the RTF. As garpu said, though, that doesn’t actually convert the file format, so it doesn’t help when you have to provide a file in the requested format.
What I don’t know is whether you can then simply save the document and have Word actually save the file as Word 97-2003 or RTF. I suspect that it keeps track of the format and just saves back to the same, regardless of the file name, so that you’d have to perform Save As to change the format. In theory, this is something you could script using the COM object interface, but unless it’s something you have to do all of the time, why bother?
