I have a project with 4600+ documents. I organize them by tag. Is there a way to create a search to find tagless documents? That way I could avoid an enormous amount of clicking.
Thanks,
j
By “tag”, do you mean “keyword”, “status”, “label”, or maybe a “custom metadata” field?
Regardless of which of these search fields you use, I think you can do a search using toolbar search feature. At the left edge of the search field in the toolbar, there’s a magnifying glass icon. Click on that icon, and you get a number of options, including a way to limit what field you are searching in (such as “Keywords”)-pick the one you used to put your tags into.
There’s another option for (if I recall correctly) “regex”. Try selecting that. Regex (“regular expressions”) is a very powerful search ‘language’ that makes use of symbols to represent various aspects of what you’re searching through. For instance, “[0-9]” is a way to search for a single numerical digit of values 0,1,2… through 9.
Once you have this option turned on, enter the following in the search field (do not include the quote marks): “^$”
That’s the regular expression for “find an empty search field”. Starting a regular expression with “^” represents the beginning of the field being searched, and ending a regular expression with “$” represents the end of the field being searched. With nothing in between the two, it means that you want to match a search field that has nothing between the beginning and the end of that field. I haven’t tested this, so I hope it works out. Good luck!
Oh, and one other thing–If the search works, you can save that search, and then revisit that saved search collection whenever you want to tag more documents.
I meant keyword. I know better. I’d like to collect together all the documents without keywords.
I just got a chance to test out my suggestion, and it failed to work. I guess the beginning and end anchor characters don’t work in Scrivener’s Regex implementation…
So this is what I’d try next; Select the “Keywords” option, use any of the “Operator” options you like, and be sure the “Options” section reflects the documents/folders you want to include or exclude from the search. Then enter an asterisk in the search field. That will result in a search that finds all of the documents that do have at least one keyword assigned.
Now, click on one of the documents in the search results (where the binder normally is), and hit the CMD-a keyboard shortcut to select all of the documents. CTRL-Click on the icon of one of the selected documents, and choose an alternative icon to represent “has a keyword assigned”. Now when you scroll through the binder, you’ll see the documents that have keywords and the ones that don’t.
Save your search so that you can later identify the documents that gained keywords since the last time you changed icons.
Once you have assigned all the documents, you can go back to the search and CTRL-click on the icon of one of the selected documents and choose “Reset Icon to Default”.
Alternately, you can mass-change other metadata, such as Label or Status instead of the icons, but that info isn’t always as visible in all views as the icon is.
Hope that helps!
I’m off to try this. It looks exactly like what I need. Using the status is intriguing. Thanks for your effort.
I have my docs identified! Thanks. Any idea on how to invert the selection?