Is it possible (without much friction) to use Scrivener instead of Word? I work on book-length projects, and clients send me documents in .docx format. I am not particularly fond of Word on macOS, and I like the idea of using Scrivener, but I worry about compatibility…
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It depends what you do with your text. If you relied on a lot of back and forth, comments, tracked changes, I would stay within Word for that sort of thing. Furthermore Scriv is not for page layouting and presentation and so once more, if that matters stay with Word.
Scrivener doesn’t open docx natively but you can import a range of text related files. At the end when you finish writing you will need to “compile” (export) the Scrivener file back to a range of more shareable formats of your choice, say rtf or docx. So in my book that qualifies as quite a lot of friction!!
For instance - when I generate my own long form writing I start in Scrivner; when my PHD students send me a 10,000 word draft of a chapter, I read and annotate in Word. I tend to think it if it as the app I use only for individual projects. When a recently co-wrote an article with two others I drafted my contribution in Scriv but once copied to an Office 365 online Word doc we all shared, that’s (regrettably) where I had to do the rest of my writing.
Scrivener have a very generous 30 day trial so you can try things out. They also have a very active forum to ask questions, which includes discussions about collaboration.
Hope that helps - and welcome to MPU!
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The folks who develop Scrivener at Literature & Latte know full well how to integrate writers’ use of Scrivener with a world that also uses Microsoft Word. They’ve done the worry for you–you just need to give it a go and try.
You write in the Scrivener tool–designed for writing, not formatting. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to format as you write, as Word sort of implies one must do. When you need to provide a Word DOCX file for others, you use the Scrivener “compile” process to output a DOCX file … or DOC, PDF, RTF, ODT, FDX, Fountain, Kindle, TEX, html, fodt, ePub (and perhaps others not listed).
I have no problem with Word and have used it since it was introduced first for DOS, then Windows, then macOS. But for writing Scrivener has stood the test of time for me.
@SebMacV has explained the normal working process in this messy world quite well.
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Thanks for the reply!
Yes, I have downloaded the trial and played around a little; it seems to load .docx files well enough, but the revision function is not truly analogous to Word’s “Track Changes,” and I think that’ll be a stumbling block for my workflow.
I’ll have a read of the Scrivener forums to see if anyone has offered any relevant advice there.
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Yes, I’m sure that for my own documents it’ll be fine, but my workflow involves multiple generations of the same file being passed around between different authors/editors, and I think so complex a sequence might strain the Scrivener-Word interface.
Humm. All you would do in Scrivener is “compile” to DOCX format, give it a file name that reflections the “generation” of that file (prefix or suffix of date in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format, for example?), then send it out.
It would be no more complex than that.
I’d stick with Word with your workflow.
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Right, because I need clients to be able to click ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ on edits made to the document, and I don’t think Scrivener allows for that.
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You are giving a new requirement. Yes, Scrivener not designed to do that sort of export/import of revisions on the DOCX files it creates.
Sounds like you and your clients should be using Microsoft Word.
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Scrivener is not designed as a tool for producing a final ms. for circulation editing or publication.
Yes, you can produce via Compile an MS Word file, or an EPUB file, but the purpose of Scrivener is a set of tools for research, drafting, and revising.
Not for publishing or editing.
N.B. I’m making a distinction here between what writers do (revise) and what editors do (edit).
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I guess it depends on your use case. I would not use it to publish a book if I were a selfpublisher. But you can compile a somewhat decent document, be it a .doc or ebook, to send in to a publisher or your university or if you want to make an ebook available for non-professional purposes (family, a club or whatever). I know selfpublishers that use Scrivener very extensively in their publishing process but I think they do some tweaking of their final file in a dedicated desktop publishing program.
You are giving a new requirement.
I should have been more specific in my original post.
Sounds like you and your clients should be using Microsoft Word.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.
Yes, that distinction makes sense.
I recently shared a Scrivener project, called ScrivQ, in the Scrivener forum, set up to publish books in docx, epub, html and pdf using Quarto and Pandoc. In a sense, it fills a gap for people who want to be able to self publish using Scrievener. It does nothing however to allow a round trip from Word, if that is needed. (Having said that, Scrivener has superb text comparison tools, so that simply copying and pasting the new text would immediate allow one to see the differences using the Matching Text view in the inspector. )
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