Hi!
I’m new to Scrivener and trying to set up my dissertation document in it. One of my chapters is a word document that a friend edited, I think, in an open word format. When I try to import it I lose all the formatting and comments in the document, as well as the footnotes… is there a way to alter the document before I upload it to fix? I tried just copy-pasting into a new word doc and resaving, but it is still happening. Help!
Often the best thing to do is to open the document in whatever word processor it was originally made for (so .docx would use Word, .odt would use LibreOffice) and then from there, export as RTF or “Rich Text Format”. The latter is Scrivener’s native format, and so it doesn’t have to do any work converting the format itself. Usually the original word processor will do a far better job of this conversion than anything else will. There are exceptions (Pages is awful at RTF, for example), but it’s a good rule of thumb.
It sounds to me like you are working with an ODT file though, and LibreOffice is free! So you might as well just take that approach, but it will involve installing Java. Let me know and I can walk you through it if you aren’t familiar with that.
If you would rather make Scrivener do the conversion instead of the native program though, there is something we can do to drastically improve the import quality. Let me know.