Issue with Writing Outlines

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I’m new to Scrivener and am having a hard time using it the way I need to. I’ve been through the interactive tutorial, watched other videos, and searched the forum and have not yet found anything about this issue. I’m hoping someone will have some advice for me.

I am composing a non-fiction project that is basically the business plan, patent proposal, and complete details for a new invention. Since this is a project still in the process of being developed with many changes still to come, a ton of information to manage and manipulate, and many different categories of data, I thought scrivener would be a perfect fit. However, much of what I need to write is in an outline format. It doesn’t particularly matter what outline format (I,A,1,a… 1, 1.1, 1.1.1… or any other standard outline format) but I’m having a nightmare getting Scrivener to do this for me.

Although I was able to start writing an outline with no issues, when I went back to edit it, the format and tiering got butchered anytime I tried to make a change.

Is there something I could be doing wrong to cause this or is Scrivener not the right program for me?

If Scrivener is the problem and not me, what program would do better?

MS Word’s outlines are horrific and while I like OneNote’s outlines, I need more structure and standard formatting than OneNote can provide. I am hoping I can find a way to make Scrivener work for me since I particularly like how in Scrivener I can take my categories into as many layers of sublevels as I want and see it all to the right of my typing in an index or table of contents style. I also like how easy it is to move and re-organize data.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

2

In Scrivener, the natural way to create an “outline” would be as a series of documents in the Binder:

[code]* Business Plan
* Product Idea
* Target Customers
* Development Timeline

  • Patent Proposal
    * Abstract
    * Prior Art
    * Background
    * Invention[/code]

And so forth. Once that series of documents is created, you can view them in Outline mode, shuffle them around using the Corkboard, add notes and synopses and text, and all the other nice things that Scrivener lets you do.

If instead you’re trying to create the outline like you would in Word, as essentially a series of nested lists within a single document… yeah, I can see why that would be frustrating. The two tools have very different philosophies.

Katherine