I am trying out Scrivener as a writing tool for my short daily news articles.
One of the shortcomings for this type of work is the inability to sort by date. It seems the program only allows alphabetical sorting, so I started giving my documents titles starting with the date - e.g. 080213_NAME OF DOCUMENT
However, today when I hit sort, many of the documents starting with today’s date remained scattered among documents created over the previous 48 hours.
I am now a bit confused. Does Scrivener sort documents by title when choosing “Sort” from the “Documents” menu, or is there a different criteria?
I’m not clear on why you need to sort at all. The Binder lets you arrange documents and folders wherever you want. Yes, there’s a Sort command, but I’ve never used it, and I do sometimes keep items in chronological order. But I just manually place them in a sequence, which doesn’t take that much effort and time.
If you’re trying to use a single Scrivener project as a database for all of your news articles, you might want to think about using DevonNote or DevonThink Pro for that purpose instead. The DT products sort in many ways, and a date pattern like 2008-02-13 will keep items in precise chronological order.
I know it’s not Scrivener’s real purpose, but I have in fact been trying to use one Scrivener project to write and store all of my short daily news articles. Though it wasn’t really created to do that, I just love the writing environment that Scrivener provides so much more than any other tool.
So, yes, I basically have a database of hundreds of articles that I need to keep sorted.