My feature request is for the ability to search Scrivener documents by creation date and/or modification date.
I principally use Scrivener to organize ideas, citable notes, and prewriting for my academic work. But I think this request is relevant to any Scrivener user who is interested in:
a) monitoring changes and additions to their projects over given periods of time, or
b) finding that one great new note you know you made yesterday morning but which is currently lost in your complicated binder structure!
For myself, the primary use case of such a search function would be to monitor additions and changes to projects, as an indicator of project progress over a given period of time. Knowing how many new notes I’ve added, or which documents I’ve changed, over a given period of time, gives me an important information about my project progress. (I ideally like to check in weekly with projects and this would be such a great, easy window into “work done”!) . Absent a good search feature by date created/modified, I’ve tried adding and maintaining custom metadata about creation and modification; but geez…you probably all know how long such a laborious system gets maintained.
But again, another main use case is simply searching for lost notes wherein the main thing I remember about them is when they were made!
Oh, almost forgot: the “best” workaround I’ve found for making documents searchable by time and date, is using a keyboard shortcut to add a time and date stamp into the text itself EVERY TIME I make a note.
I don’t like this as a workaround because:
a) It does add a teeny bit of friction to the process of adding a new note, obviously. (Not to mention it feels sadly redundant, as I know it’s already in the note metadata – where it is, alas, unsearchable!). But more importantly:
b) It’s an extra visual distraction, in the note. And, most importantly:
c) I add half of my notes on iOS, where there is no such keyboard shortcut, so it’s very hard to keep this as a consistent habit.
I sometimes want to do that kind of thing too. On the Mac, I type an asterisk into the search bar, which returns a flat list of everything in my project. Then I look at these results in outline view, and sort the outline by date modified or date.
Unfortunately in the Windows version, there is no option to sort by column in the outliner view. The outline is also not searchable by control-F or exportable to a sortable spreadsheet, as far as I’m aware, though I’d be very happy to learn there is a way to do any of these things!
On Windows you can export the outline. From the File menu - Export - Outline to CVS. One drawback is that it exports all columns, not just the ones you’ve selected. But even so it’s easy enough to sort in the resulting spreadsheet.
Thanks! Hey, look, you CAN export the outliner as a .csv file, and sort it by date created/modified!
It’s still far from ideal (just a simple search in Scrivener, with the ability to directly open up the documents listed, would be heavenly…) but this will do in an emergency! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing.