I want to open an old completed project, but when I try “open recent projects” (I have very few projects going, and it hasn’t been that long since I last opened it), it’s not there, and when I click on “Open,” I get a window showing documents on my Mac hard drive, but no Scrivener projects.
I quit Scrivener and restarted it, but it just automatically opened my current project. I don’t even seem to be able to get the startup page, where you find options for templates, etc. Is this a matter of opening the old file from my backup on a thumb drive? Any ideas?
Thanks, Briar, for your reply. I tried that, but I don’t see any Scrivener files that way. The files also exist in Word, and those certainly show up in Finder, but I want to see things as they are arranged in Scrivener.
I think I have four projects in Scrivener, but can only see two of them at the moment. I get nowhere with either “Open” or “Recent Projects.” And I still can’t get the Scrivener start page, and that might help.
File->New Project gets you to the start page (I think of it as a template chooser myself… not sure what the official name is). But I don’t think that’s going to help you locate your scrivener projects.
In the finder, there’s a search field (an oval with a loupe icon in it) in the upper right of the window. Type in the following:
.scriv
Be sure to start with the period. A drop-down will appear, with “Scrivener Project” in the list. Select that. Below the search field, there’s a grey bar with “Search:” at the start of it, and a few options; select “This Mac”. At the far right, click the “save” button and name it “Scriv Projects” or whatever you like.
Now this search will appear in the left column of all your finder windows, so you can always locate any stray projects on your drive.
If your missing projects are still on your hard drive, they’ll be found with this search. Clicking on each of them will show it’s location in the bottom of the Finder window.
You can also use Spotlight to find “scriv” files. On my Mac, it works with or sans the period (though sans the period isn’t as restrictive, naturally).
There is also a convenience command for creating a Spotlight search window: File/Find All Projects in Spotlight.
As an aside, if you are using Scrivener 2.1 you should probably update, that version is nearly four years old now, and a lot of important bugs have been fixed since then.
That’s the result I get, but I have Spotlight turned off as I never use it. Does it work if you change the search term entirely to “.scriv”? Maybe the “kind” database is messed up on your Mac (I see for example that your search window has a plain old document icon instead of the purple Smart Folder icon).
Does it work if you change the search term entirely to “.scriv”? Maybe the “kind” database is messed up on your Mac (I see for example that your search window has a plain old document icon instead of the purple Smart Folder icon).