Scrivener is my go-to writing tool for just about everything1 but it has a weakness: compiling Word documents with built-in headings that make them easy to navigate. Here’s how to solve that problem.
I don’t often write about Scrivener because there’s a community of people who really know their way around it, not least the Scrivener Users Facebook group run by the excellent Bobby Treat, Anne Rainbow aka the ScrivenerVirgin, and Literature & Latte’s own forums. However, even they don’t know everything.
Just recently, I noticed a question on Scrivener Users that the regular experts said was impossible to solve. I recognised the problem and realised that I’d solved it just a few days earlier after years of trying. William Powell asked:
When I compile2 to Microsoft Word, I’d like my chapter headings to be rendered with outline level set to Level 1, so I can use Word’s Navigation Pane to move around my document.
As several people replied, it’s not hard to do manually, but it is time-consuming. That’s especially true if, like me, you often work through a few iterations of a compile before you’re happy.
And it is useful, because a lot of other software and services use Word’s headings to automatically structure documents when you import or upload them. As William’s question notes, it’s also a boon for editors who receive your work.
For reasons best know to its creators, Scrivener doesn’t create Word-friendly headings by default when you compile in the docx format, but it does go halfway. There are actually two ways to export from Scrivener to Word with built-in heading styles. I’m on a Mac but these instructions should also work for Scrivener and Word in Windows.

Word-friendly headings in Scrivener: method 1
The first route is to take one of the existing Scrivener Formats in Compile. Select “Duplicate and Edit” to add it to your own formats, then go to Section Layouts. Don’t forget to rename it to something useful (as I haven’t).
Click into the title example shown in the text box at the bottom right of this page. Select the fonts and styles drop-down in the formatting bar, then select Heading 1 or Heading 2, and they will be applied in the Word document when you create it.
Voila! A navigable Word document. I have to wonder why Scrivener doesn’t apply these heading styles by default in its manuscript formats.

If you don’t like the default styles, you can change them in the Styles tab. These styles will replace anything you have in the main Scrivener editor, and this ability to export your work in different styles for different formats is a powerful tool when you get the hang of it.

Compile can be hard to understand when you just want a Word version of your work in a hurry. I’d recommend performing regular compiles to get used to the process and try different options. Compiling doesn’t affect your manuscript, so there’s nothing to lose if you don’t like the results.
Word-friendly headings in Scrivener: method 2
The second route is more complex but it can be useful if you’ve already set up styles for your compile. My styles in this novel are a painfully complex legacy of the way it emerged, but they’ve taught me a lot about using compile in Scrivener.
Open the Styles tab and you’ll see “Override name” on the right. This is the style name that Word will see in the compiled document. In the example below, my Act Heading style becomes Heading 1, Day Heading becomes Heading 2, etc. With this method, you can override any of the default styles in Word.

It’s slightly depressing how easy this solution seems when you understand how to do it. After almost seven years, there’s a lot I still don’t understand about Scrivener compile because I use it rarely compared to my day-to-day writing. I appreciate that this is no different than any other powerful creativity app like Photoshop, but even so, those little question mark buttons could do a lot more work providing contextual help when you’re in the middle of puzzling through a problem.
- I’ve experimented with Scrivener, Scapple, Plottr, Xmind, Aeon Timeline and Trello for outlining. Plottr’s currently my favourite. ↩︎
- Compiling is the process of combining several documents within your Scrivener file and exporting them in formats such as Word’s docx, PDF or ebook. ↩︎
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[…] Alexander Lane‘s blog article, How to create Word-friendly headings in Scrivener compile, he shows how to set up the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles in the Compile feature, then apply them […]