Hello,
I just moved from Scrivener 1 to Scrivener 3 on Windows and I can’t figure out if there is a way to completely hide the word count from displaying in the footer without also hiding the zoom and other footer options. I’m aware I can hide the footer. I am aware I can switch from words to characters in the display. I’ve done that for now so that I’m not distracted by the number of words (it’s giving me anxiety to constantly be looking at how many words I wrote so far…what about now…how about 3 words later …), but now I have no way to look at the wordcount at the end of the day when I finished writing, short of going back to the options and setting it back to words so I can take a look, record it in my spreadsheet, and then switch it back off.
There has to be a less insane way to do this. Could someone please help? I was completely fine with the old Scrivener 1 method of hitting the wordcount menu button to retrieve it at the end of the session and would like to go back to that. Is my only reprieve to lose zoom and to keep hiding and showing footer to do this in a way that doesn’t interrupt my writing flow? Thank you in advance.
Hello, welcome to the forum! This is indeed something that was supposed to be done a certain way, and for some reason it was done another way. Basically the options, in Editing: Options, were supposed to be checkboxes so you could turn on multiple statistics if you wanted, or even none at all. Instead it is a drop-down that only lets you pick one, and the option to pick none was not included. It’s been filed as a problem, for a long time now, but yeah, as it stands if you want no distractions of this nature the only real choice is to turn off the footer bar.
As for recording your progress though, take a look at the Outliner columns you have available. You can add a word count column, and then use the File ▸ Export ▸ Outliner Contents as CSV, which will import nicely into a spreadsheet. So you might not have to bother with turning things on and off, and certainly not manually recording numbers.
Okay I think I found a way to get statistics across multiple pages - I have to go into Project statistics, wait while it calculates the statistics for the entire project and then I am able to select the “selected documents” tab on the popup and get the statistics only for my writing session.
This is very cubbersome but it allows me to completely hide the footer and never look at it, and lose view of zoom percentage but I guess I can live with it. I was going to downgrade back to Scriv1 because of this.
Please, devs, consider separating wordcount for the page from all other stuff (project statistics, footer), thank you.