Turning off group mode in order to apply a target to the folder directly is hardly a “workaround.” It provides exactly the functionality you requested.
In Outline view, right-click in the bar where you see Title and Synopsis, Label, Status, etc. and add two fields by clicking their checkboxes: Words and Total Words. Click on the Draft/Synopsis folder and the Total Words field will display, you know, total words for each top-level folder (probably your chapters) in the draft.
First of all: I am overjoyed to have found Scrivener. It’s a huge help for my daily writing. Thanks as well for allowing me to use this forum and a first warm hello from Switzerland to the participants!
My first concern would be:
Is it also possible to define writing targets for folders? To calculate at a glance the statistics of a folder with its content?
(Sense and purpose: structure, e.g. hero’s journey (12 beats). Each beat contains 4-5 sub-chapters as individual documents. It would be very convenient for orientation if I could display the text statistics, i.e. the total of the contained documents, right in the superordinate folder. I know the option via Project/Statistics/Selected Document …)
Hello, and welcome to the forum!
I have merged your query with a recent discussion on the same topic. Please refer to this post above for instructions on setting a word/character goal for a folder/group.
If you scroll up further you’ll also find some tips that involve using the Outliner. It’s worth noting there are special columns you can add to the outliner that track total word counts within groups, and even add progress bars and so on. You’ll find the different columns documented in the user manual PDF, under §8.3.4, List of Available Columns.
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Thank you very much for the help. It works as described in your post (How to set target word count for folder? - #17 by AmberV), as long as you do not define a separate target in the documents. If you do, this target total is added to the target total defined in the parent folder. Or is there something wrong with my settings?
That’s a good observation. It will indeed sum the individual goals found from within the group’s child items as well. That way you can set more finely detailed goals, and then work toward the whole at the group level. It could be argued that mixing these two techniques together wouldn’t be terribly useful, and it would probably be simpler to stick with one or the other. Either put a goal on the group container and forget about more detailed tracking, or the other way around, used detailed tracking and let the software manage the totals. I suppose you could try to manage it, adding a subdocument goal and then subtracting what you added to the container’s goal to keep the number the same, but that seems like a lot of overhead to me.