Hello,
I hate Word, and I just stumbled on David Gewirtz praising Scrivener on ZD-Net : zdnet.com/article/2014-the-y … my-loyalty
Can you please tell me whether this is the software I have been waiting for ?
I don’t write literature. I write blog posts, business reports, technical texts, structured documents and (long) memos to myself. I have been forced to use Word for decades, and I have still not mastered it, despite several training sessions and much book-reading.
My main gripes with Word are :
- Outlining
I intensively use outlining to juggle with ideas, create text, and dig up information later. I always start in Word’s Plan mode. Word’s outliner is very good for that, up and until you try to change the style and add numbering, at which point it gets rotten. I understand that Scrivener’s outliner does not do numbering (very unfortunate), but how does it perform as an idea-grinder and a retrieving system ? And how well does it translate to a nice-looking page, with indentations if need be ? (Under Word, there’s no way to translate, out of the box, the logical hierarchy into a visual one, with lower-level titles sliding to the right together with the attached text.)
- Style
I’d like to torture myself whoever invented the style “method” on Word. Although I agree in theory with the logic of separating the writing process and the layout work, I need my page to look good in order to help me write. Adjusting syle has to be reasonably straightforward, and not the multi-layered, unworkable nightmare it is on Word.
I read here https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/best-features-about-this-software/26640/1 that a common method to polish up the layout was exporting to Word, which I dread.
(I use Word 2003, but I would be very surprised if the current version has changed fundamentally.)
What Word is good for is integration. It integrates exceptionally well with Excel (I suppose you can’t stick an Excel spreadsheet in the middle of a Scrivener page, and still have a live spreadsheet), but it also has hyperlinks, which I use a lot.
In fact, I intensely use the Web, and I’ve yet to find a tool to collect bits and bytes gathered from the Web and my hard disk, which could then be used to create text. Everybody says that Evernote is the software for this, but every time I try to use it I close it almost immediately, because I cannot fathom the user interface (and I also resent the sneaky way it half-forces you to upload your stuff to the cloud, which is bad manners from a privacy standpoint).
How would Scrivener perform as a collecting tool from the Web (say, for links, mht files, bits of text, images and pdfs) ? Is it helpful to compose blog posts ?
Many thanks for your thoughts, and congratulations for a superb forum (and software manuals ; when you find a little time, extra screen captures would be a welcome improvement).