How to Use Tables in Scrivener Projects

Most long-form writing projects don’t use tables. But there are many reasons why you might want to create tables in your Scrivener project. For certain types of nonfiction, tables may be an essential part of your project. Even if you’re writing a novel, you might want to use tables to help in worldbuilding, creating and managing characters, and tracking scenes or timelines.

In this article, we’ll talk about how you create, modify, and edit tables in Scrivener.

Why use tables in Scrivener projects?

As mentioned above, there are several reasons why you might want to use tables in a Scrivener project. Nonfiction books or articles often use tables to present data, sometimes combined with charts, which you can add as images.

But tables aren’t just for writing; you can use them in your preparation and research. You can use tables to help you build a complex world for your novel. You can use tables to compare character traits, map locations by attribute (geography, population, faction), or cross-reference terminology and lore entries. You could do all this in a spreadsheet, but having this information in your Scrivener project – either in your Research folder or in a note file – keeps everything in your project. It also makes this information accessible via Scrivener’s powerful project search feature.

Tables can also allow you to make more complex character or setting sheets. They make it easier to list common information across these documents that you can scan quickly. You can set up your own custom character and setting sheet templates with tables to use these for all your characters.

While Scrivener lets you view your novel’s structure in three ways – in the Binder, Corkboard, or Outliner – tables allow you to enter more information about individual scenes or chapters, such as secondary characters, locations, themes, and more. You could create a table with multiple columns, and with each chapter or scene in a row, showing as much information as you want to have an overview of your story.

Finally, you can use tables to track revisions, edits, and submissions for your project, recording versions and dates. We discuss one way of doing this with a folder in your Scrivener project in this article, but a table is another way of organizing this information.

Inserting tables

To add a table to a file, choose Insert > Table. Scrivener adds a table with two rows and three columns. If you select text before adding the table, Scrivener inserts that text in the first cell of the table, the one at the top left. This is different from how some word processors work, where you can select multiple lines of text or tabbed text, and it is inserted in different cells when creating a table.

When you add a table, Scrivener displays a palette that allows you to adjust it. Note that the Mac and Windows versions of Scrivener offer different table formatting options.

With this palette, you can immediately change the size of the table by altering the Rows and Columns numbers. You can add borders and backgrounds. On Scrivener for Mac, you can set cell alignment, both horizontal and vertical. On Windows, you can set the cell width. To adjust alignment, use the buttons in the Format Bar.

Alignment, borders, and backgrounds apply to selected cells. If you want to change a single cell, click in that cell and apply your formatting. If you want to change multiple cells, click in one cell, then drag to select the others that you want to change. You can then apply formatting.

You can also select all the cells in your table to apply formatting, such as a font, size, or more. You can create custom styles for your tables if you use a lot of them in your project, so they are formatted differently from the main text and consistently.

Editing and manipulating tables

Beyond the basic formatting options in the Table palette, there are several options to work with tables. To access these features, either right-click anywhere in the table and choose Table to display a sub-menu, or choose Format > Table. There are more table formatting options on Mac than on Windows.

If you’re familiar with spreadsheets, you’ll see similar features in this menu to add rows and columns, move them up and down or left and right, delete rows and columns, and remove borders.

You can resize rows and columns by hovering your cursor over their borders until it changes to show a resize cursor. And Distribute Rows Evenly and Distribute Columns Evenly, available on Mac, adjusts all rows or columns to the same size.

You can also choose Remove Table from this menu. If you do this, Scrivener deletes the table but retains the text, aligning it in your document with tabs before each column and returns before each row.

Compiling Scrivener projects with tables

When you compile your Scrivener project, Scrivener combines all the elements of the top-level folder of your Binder: folders and files, chapters and scenes. For most projects, compiling is fairly simple: there’s just text, and perhaps some inline images.

Scrivener compiles tables as is with no alteration. But there are some situations when you may want to combine tables. The Scrivener manual says that this feature is “mainly useful for formats that require a single table for the whole document (such as certain documentary script formats).”

To access this option, you need to create a custom compile format. (See this article to learn about custom compile formats.) In the Table settings, check Stitch together adjacent tables if possible. You can also have Scrivener add blank rows between tables and restrict table width.

Note that Scrivener can only stitch together tables that contain the same number of columns. Scrivener uses the column widths of the first table throughout.

Tables are a great tool for organizing data, both in the body of your project and for worldbuilding. Even if they aren’t part of your finished manuscript, Scrivener’s tables have lots of options that can help you manage data.