Hello,
I hope I explain this accurately. I have been wanting to reorganize my classroom lectures and labs into Scrivener projects. This is easy for my written lectures, but I am having trouble using Scrivener to organize my powerpoints. I was hoping that I could open my Scrivener project and there, in different folders, would be all of my written lectures and powerpoints that go with them. Then all I would have to do to refer to a powerpoint would be to click the approriate file name and voila, it would open the powerpoint.
I have read the instructions in other posts to “drag and drop” the files into the research folder of the binder, which I have tried, but when I click on the file name all I get is a redirect to my documents folder on my harddrive, and not even to the actual destination folder. If I have to manually navigate all the way to the destination folder, then dropping my files in Scrivener won’t be any help.
Am I doing something wrong or am I simply expecting something outside the bounds of the program?
Thanks for any help,
Jan
You should be able to drag individual PowerPoint files into the binder to import them into Scrivener’s project folder (the .scriv folder, where the “project” file is stored along with everything else making up the project), and selecting the file in the binder should then place a hyperlink in the editor to open the imported file directly in PowerPoint. You can also use Documents > Open > Open in External Editor (Ctrl+F5).
This is opening the copy of the file that was imported to the project, so it’s no longer associated with the original copy you dragged from Windows Explorer. If you want to keep the file accessible outside of Scrivener also, so that changes you make to it there will still be reflected when opening from within Scrivener, you’ll want to use the Document or Project References in the inspector. That will create a link to the file on your hard drive, though again if you’re dragging in the PPT file and not its parent folder, you should see the file name and icon in the inspector and double-clicking the icon will open the linked file directly in PowerPoint.
Try dragging a single PPT or PPTX file into the Research folder and then selecting that. Does it have the correct PowerPoint icon in the binder? If you click the linked title in the editor on that, what opens?
Actually, I tried your suggestion and I also tried using the import command in the file menu. It does transfer the name of the powerpoint file, but if I click that link I am merely thrown out of Scrivener to the rot of my documents directory, and then I have to navigate to the file, which fully negates the purpose of including it in Scrivener…
Any other ideas?
THANKS!
OOPS - I meant, I am thrown out to my ROOT directory… 
Hm, odd. What’s a sample file path? I wonder if there’s some odd character or pattern in that which is tripping things up. You do see the correct icon in the binder for the file?
Ah, ha! Sort of a breakthrough thanks to your advice. In the center of the text editor it had a link to the file. That was what sent me to the root directory. BUT when you said to look at the icon, I right clicked it and selected “open in external editor” and viola! It worked. THANKS a billion!