If by outlines, you mean paragraphs which have been treated in Word’s outline mode, these will not be translated by Scrivener into Scrivener outline structure. That is because the two are fundamentally different things. Scriv outlines are hierarchical arrangements of documents (your Binder on steroids). Word outlines are specially tagged paragraphs which are treated hierarchically in Word’s outline mode. So, the (invisible) outline level tag on your paragraphs will be stripped when you bring them into Scriv (because, Scriv has no corresponding notion of within-document outlining to convert it to).
BUT nonetheless, if you set things up right, you can easily transfer Word outline structures to homestyle Scrivener in-document outline structures. There are two parts to my solution: A) setting up in-document outlining in Scriv, and B) getting Word-outline structured paragraphs into Scrivener with their structures intact. This is not hard, it just requires creating some style settings in both Scrivener and Word.
A)
In Scriv, create a series of dummy paragraphs with increasing whole-paragraph indents, i.e. that have the look that you want your in-doc outline paragraphs to have. Be sure to also have a default format paragraph handy with no indent.
Take each of these paragraphs and create a paragraph-format-preserving preset. Give these suitable names, e.g. O1, O2, O3, … and, say, OD for the default format paragraph. (Word has 9 levels of indent, but maybe you don’t use that many.)
Now use Apple System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts to make key commands for these Scrivener paragraph styles. I like shift-cmd-1, shift-cmd-2, . . . Shift-cmd-0.
At this point you now have a fully functional homespun “in-doc outline mode” for scrivener.
B)
The key to getting Word outline-structured paragraphs to retain their structure when arriving in scriv is to take advantage of the fact that scriv preserves basic paragraph format when you paste from Word or import a word doc. The trick here is to realize that outlines in Word have two different paragraph stylings. There is the hierarchical indent style you see when you look at the paragraph in Outline Mode. This styling is unique to Outline Mode and not controlled by you.
But these outline-level tagged paragraphs also have a standard paragraph style which you see when in Word’s Draft or Page Layout View. By default that style is unindented no matter the outline level of the paragraph. But we can change that and that is what you need to.
In Word, choose menu Format > Styles. In the resulting dialog box scroll to find the styles named Heading1, Heading2, etc. These are what determine what outline-leveled paras look like in Word when in Draft of Page Layout view. All you need to do is modify each of these style definitions to give each paragraph type a whole paragraph indent corresponding to its outline level and where the amount of the indent is the same as what you set up for that level in Scriv.
Having adjusted those style definitions, quit out of Word and, if it asks, say Yes to saving the changes to the Normal template.
So now you have everything you need. Just remember, if using Copy and Paste to transfer outline structured text from word, get out of Outline mode before you do the Copy operation and get into Draft or Page Layout view – that way we will nab the custom paragraph styling we need when the Copy happens.
Greg