Scrivener 3 is on the way…

Posted by Chris Thompson
Dec 1, 2017 at 04:28 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:
>I wasn’t aware of the sub-documents feature of
>Word, but I don’t think that works the same way as Writing Outliner. I
>don’t want to bring any documents together (in outline view or any other
>way, and certainly not manually, one by one!) until it’s time to export,
>then I want to export to a Word file which requires little or not
>further editing because whilst I can edit a 3000 page plus document in
>Word, it is slooooowwwww. Writing Outliner keeps the chunks separate but
>links them in a “project” and it provides an interface to access and
>edit each chunk as a separate Word document, in a similar way to
>Scrivener’s interface.

You may want to look into the subdocuments feature some more—I don’t really understand how what you’re describing is different from what Word offers.

In Word, each subdocument is its own separate “chunk”. These are separate Word documents—you can open them separately, save them separately, e-mail them to other people, etc. Or you can open the master document, which consolidates all the chunks into one single document. When you’ve opened a master document, the outline view allows individual chunks to be collapsed or expanded, which allows you to move from document to document, or edit two documents at the same time, without having to open them directly. But you can open them directly if you want.

I believe in the last two versions of Word this is also integrated with the document structure sidebar, which would give you a two-pane outliner view rather than the Word outliner’s traditional one-pane outliner view. But I haven’t personally experimented with how the sidebar interacts with subdocuments.