I recently purchased a copy of Scrivener. I’ve previously done my writing in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word, using Microsoft OneNote when I wanted to keep track of details. However, everyone raves about Scrivener, so I figured I’d give it a go!
With that in mind, I’ve spent this weekend working my way through the interactive tutorial – and yes, I probably will read the entire user manual at some point – I’m the sort of person who always reads the instructions! I might forget how to do something – but I usually remember that it can be done. 
Anyway, since I tend to save all my ideas for plots as individual documents, I was curious to see how Scrivener would cope with importing those if I were to just highlight everything in my ‘Ideas’ folder and attempt to import it. Obviously, I didn’t actually do that – I set up test files in OpenOffice and Word, one regular and one password protected for each program & imported them to a test project in Scrivener.
I should perhaps mention that I already knew that Scrivener didn’t support importing for OpenOffice documents (apparently, the work-around is to cut & paste, or I suppose you could save it as a .doc or some other supported format.) – I just wanted to see what would happen.
The results were:
General: It wouldn’t import the folder that contained the documents, I had to select all the documents within the folder individually. I mention this because, depending on how you organise your writing, you may have sub-folders for a project you’re working on in another program and need to factor that in when you come to import that particular writing project to Scrivener.
OpenOffice .ODT file: Didn’t import – but Scrivener created a document that consisted of a link to the OpenOffice file on my hard drive – clicking on the link started up OpenOffice and opened the file.
OpenOffice ODR file – Password Protected: As above, didn’t import but I got a document with a link that started up OpenOffice, prompted me for the password & opened the document once I entered it.
Microsoft Word .DOCX file: Imported as a document.
Microsoft Word .DOCX file – Password Protected: Didn’t import, created an error message and, where the document would usually go in Scrivener (represented by a sheet of paper with lines on it) – I had a blank sheet of paper with the file name as the title but no link or anything else. I was able to type into the blank document – at which point – lines appeared on the sheet of paper icon that represents it in the Scrivener Binder.
So, there you go. I just thought I’d share that in case it’s useful to anyone else who’s starting out with Scrivener.
