I have found that Scrivener is most definitely worth the effort.
“9 years” and the only useful tool you think is the Binder’s ability to shuffle things around? And your preferred alternative to to expensively print out things and manually shuffle them? Is this automatically reflected in Word? How so without massive cutting and pasting?
For me, the ability to have in just one project my drafts (current and older), research, notes, imported files and so forth all in one place rather tthan scattered about in different programs is a game changer; add in the metadata and especially the custom metadata to keep track of characters, places, events and so forth.
The list of reasons could be longer. I am always finding new things that Scrivener can do and I just amazed.
That’s the Lotus one, right? I loved that when you inserted some text within a paragraph, you could watch as it slowly adjusted the text ahead of it. Quite therapeutic, now I think of it. Then again, sometimes it would suddenly take it up on itself to rejustify the whole document, and you’d sit there for minutes, wondering if it would ever stop, while over your should the Luddites who’d remained on DisplayWrite, pointed and sniggered.
Initially released by Samna, then taken over by Lotus who managed to ruin everything they touched after starting from a leadership position. My company represented Lotus in NZ for a while back in the mid/late '80s before I moved to Australia.
I have written a dozen academic (i.e. university press) books, first with NotaBene and then with Word. NotaBene was excellent for writing that involved several different languages and had its own notes and bibliography system. With Word I find that Zotero combined with Word offers an outstanding and quite simple way to store references and then to output notes and bibliography.
If you are sincerely interested, a better approach might be to ask about a specific application that you have in mind. Introducing yourself by declaring that “Scrivener is not worth the effort” does not really encourage further discussion.
