There's an option not to have your summaries show up on the script view, but you still see all your scene headings on the page view and this is very very distracting. If my outline changes it's no longer an outline, it's merely an extension of the script and not an outline. Personally I need to separate things to write a good script. But the program is designed so that whatever you write in your outlining phase is accurately reflected in the script. I need a locked outline so I can go back and refer to it, but when I contacted Final Draft they said there was no way to unlink the two. So I finally got my outline entered into Final Draft 8 and as I start writing my information in my outline changes as I go. You need to be able to do all three in each view.

So I figured I would write just fill out the outline in index card view, but alas you cannot enter scene titles in index card view so I figured I would try using just the summary cards, but there you cannot enter the scene headings! This was crazy to me.

In the outliner/scene view you cannot enter your summary, you have to switch to index card view. I 'imported' the outline I was already working on and by imported I mean I cut and pasted each individual story beat and then continued using FD8. Playing around with the demo I was excited, but when I upgraded for $80 I was very disappointed. They claim they took note of other programs like Scrivener and Save the Cat and others. Well now Final Draft claims to have built an ideal outlining program into their program. The text in outline mode is a little small, but I loved the notes features and the importing of html snippets and pictures and whatnot, but I didn't enjoy writing screenplays on it and to have to switch between Scrivener and Final Draft while writing was a bit of a pain so I'd ultimately end up just exporting it back to Word. But moving scenes is a bit of a pain in Word so I started to use Scrivener to outline my scripts. I've never been into the index card thing. I'm a meticulous outliner and used to outline everything in Word. It floated in 7 and I'd lose the top of my document underneath it. One of the best Mac improvements is that the menu bar is now back attached to the script document.

Though there are a few school down artifacts, but I'm used to that by now and I've found them to exist in other screenwriting programs. FD8 is far less buggy and the text is now crystal clear. 7 was very buggy until the end and its text was very unclear and there were artifacts virtually every time I scrolled down. I've been using Final Draft since version 1 or 2 and have always found the actual screenwriting aspect of the program great and easy to use.

Upgrade final draft 8 to 9