I decided to take my life in my hands and use the Windows beta once I hit about 40,000 words, when searching and scrolling back and forth in Word proved too much faffle.
The writing experience in scrivener is orders of magnitude better than a standard word processor. Just the ease of being able to jump back to previous section and then jump right back to where I was is in itself a real boon. Couple that to the split screen view, either showing a previous section or one of my research documents, and it becomes a fantastically easy way to work.
I’m taking a belt and braces approach, doing a scrivener backup at the end of each writing session as well as exporting to RTF. That done, it takes the nervousness out of it.
I have experienced a few formatting oddities, such as disappearing line breaks and seemingly random font selections. Not being able to add words to the dictionary beyond the current session is also a bit of a pain. But I’m very much looking forward to the release version (especially with the 50 percent NANO winner discount!) and am clear there is no going back to Word. Many thanks for writing it.