I am writing the second book in a series and I wondered if there was a quick and easy way to copy character and setting files to a new project?
Thanks
You can drag and drop files between projects: so for the character files, just open them both up at once and drag the documents from one binder to another.
I can’t remember whether the old version of Windows allows you to copy settings / metadata etc, but if you’ve got a lot of settings which you want to copy over, the quickest way would be simply to duplicate the whole project in File Explorer, then open the copy and delete all the documents which only relate to the first novel, leaving the settings and common documents intact.
Finally, if you’re going to be doing this a lot (for a series, say, or if your novels always use the same the metadata and settings) then you’d save a Project Template, on which new novels can be based. (This is really easy, but there are a few steps to go through, so have a look in the manual before you do this.)
HTH.
That’s brilliant! Thanks so much - very helpful!
Some people also just keep entire series in one project. Book one would either end up in a sub-folder of the draft folder, and then book2 would get its own folder, or some people just move entire books’ worth of files and folders in & out of the draft folder as needed. This allows you to share one set of support files.
The down-side to that approach, in my opinion, is that fundamental changes to these support files (character growth, marital status, hair color, mutant transormations… for instance) are only indicative of the most recent book. You have to plan for how to preserve that information and how to track which files are relevant to your current story vs. previous ones or future ones you’re planning. There are a number of approaches you can take, including named snapshots of files, tagging relevant files with keywords for each book’s title, or creating sub-folders for research related to each book.
Ultimately, it’s probably easier to just copy forward to a fresh project, as that keeps things cleaner and more focused, but I thought I’d point out that there is another approach.