I have a project where I have keywords in a hierarchy. I’d like to select all of the keywords in that hierarchy, then find all documents that have any of them. Is there a way to do that? What I’m getting when I select several keywords and press Search is documents that have all of them, rather than any of them.
Using the search field (in the toolbar by default), click on the down-arrow next to the loupe icon within the search box. Select the following options: Keyword, Any Word, and under the heading “Options” (as opposed to “Search In” and “Operator”), select whatever options make sense to you (“Exclude Trash Documents” is a good one, for instance).
Now you have to type each keyword in (or potentially copy them from the keywords window and paste them in… maybe). The results will show documents that are tagged with any of the keywords you list.
Caveat: Unfortunately, the search feature treats multi-word keywords as individual search terms. So if you have “Plot Twist”, “Plot Hook”, and “Captain Hook” as keywords, then searching for “Captain Hook” will result in documents with any keyword that contains “Captain” (just “Captain Hook” in this example) and any keyword that contains “Hook” (matches both “Captain Hook” and “Plot Hook”.)
The way around this limitation is to rename your keywords so they have no spaces in them. My preferred variation is to run the words together: CaptainHook, PlotHook, PlotTwist. On the Windows version of Scrivener, running words together this way seems to work better than for the other favored method of using underscore characters (Captain_Hook), which the search function in version 1 treats like a space.
Thank you! Great, clear explanation, and works perfectly. I appreciate the help.