I have over 1500 letters I am transcribing into Scrivener, the bulk of them between two different authors, “Bill” and “Helen”, spanning 40 years. When I’ve gotten them all into Scrivener, I want to be able to view all letters sorted by date, so I can see the conversation between between Bill and Helen, but also have the option to view all of just Bill’s letters in chronological order and all of just Helen’s in chronological order. I have created custom metadata tags for “Author” and “date”.
Can anyone tell me how I can do this? I’ve tried multiple ways unsuccessfully, and don’t to get deeper into transcribing than I already am (300 letters) before I make sure I can do what I need.
Any help or insight at all would be so very appreciated.
Search on the Author metadata to get just Bill or Helen’s letters, then sort the resulting collection by date using the Outline view. (Note that you can use a Keyword for the author name. You certainly can use custom metadata, but it’s not necessary.)
You may also want to create a saved search collection for each of “Bill” and “Helen” for quick access.
If you used list-type metadata for the author info, you can also filter the outline contents for just “Bill” or just “Helen”, then sort the results by the date column. The outline filtering is much more ephemeral than a project search or saved search collection, so it would be more of an on-the-fly option to manage what you’ve already got loaded in the outliner or additional layer if you needed to use the project search for something else to get your initial group.