I have imported my manuscript into Scrivener but then someone sent me changes in MS Word marked with “track changes.” Is there any easy way to import these changes into my Scrivener document?
Well getting rid of the change marks is easy, you just need to flatten the changes in Word before importing the document to Scrivener. There should be a button in the ribbon to accept all revisions.
Integrating a Word document back into an existing outline is where it gets a little tricky. There is nothing in the manuscript to indicate where one file ends and another begins, so you’d have to do the copy and paste text into each section that has changed. Some people just avoid that and split the imported document up, replacing the old Draft outline completely. Which to use depends on how much of Scrivener’s organisation features you use. Obviously, if you have hundreds of carefully penned synopses, or make heavy use of keywords, labels or pretty much anything in the Inspector, then copying and pasting the changed text will be easier than rebuilding the outline.
For future reference, you may be able to make use of the File/Sync/with External Folder feature, for collaboration, rather than compiling a full manuscript. Your collaborator would then work in the individual RTF files Scrivener generates. These are all specially marked so that the files link back to the originals. In effect, this system completely automates copy and pasting to update the native outline. You just punch a button and the text will update if necessary. Main drawback: your colleague will have to work in multiple RTF files. If they are chapter-length, that may not be a bad alternative, but if you outline a lot, the end result of the sync folder could be unusable.
Thanks for the help!