Been using Scrivener for more than 10 years, and I always just had a collection of documents for the the chapters in my Manuscript folder. This time I have imported an outline from Plottr, and the Documents (along with synopsis) for each chapter is buried inside a Chapter folder which is buried inside an Act folder.
It appears that there is no exploded view of this. If I want to see my outline, I have to go through and click to open every folder. This makes no sense.
What am I missing?
Hi.
First off: there is a command to expand all.
View / Outline / Expand all
Just make sure the focus is where it should, before using the command. â Binder or outliner.
(Else, itâll just be greyed out.)
As for the unnecessary hierarchy, this I donât really know, but Iâd personally first investigate on the Plotter side of things. (Scrivener usually does with what it gets ; it doesnât make up extra folders for no good reason.)
This said, if you have no intention of going back and forth between the two apps, it should be easy to fix without leaving Scrivener, once youâve expanded all, via drag and drop in the binder. (Get rid of the useless levels of hierarchy. â Pull the real content out of there, and delete whatever is the pointless extra.)
Sorry, I didnât explain what I wanted correctly. I want to be able to see an actual outline that includes the chapter title and the synopsis in outline view without having to go through and expand each chapter folder. The command you cited above does expand the view in the binder, but I cannot get it to do it in the outline view.
I just pulled up one of my old Scrivener files, and I found I was able to get it to do this before, I just donât know how I did it.
If you are blocked at a stage where it is not that you canât expand all in the outliner, but rather that you canât see the whole at once, that (very likely) means that whatever you imported IS NOT in your draft/manuscript folder in the binder.
You probably have it almost where it should be, but outside of it.
Could you screenshot your binder with the draft/manuscript master folder visible?
Else : I canât think of why the outliner wouldnât expand. (Make sure it has focus - click any element in it - before launching the expand menu command.)
Have you tried Control/Command-clicking the folders to expose the âStacked foldersâ view?
In the screenshot youâve so far provided, the synopsis IS in the chapter folder. Not somewhere in a file inside it.
Perhaps thatâs what youâve got different.
Otherwise, to display the synopsis in the outliner, it is in the list, arrow pointing to the right, at the very top, right side. â âŚwith synopsis
âŚor the icon at the far right in the footer bar. 
The View ⸠Outline ⸠commands will work in whichever outline view is focussed, so if you have focus in the binder, Expand All would expand the hierarchy there. To expand in the outliner in the editor, just click into the editor first to give it focus, then use Expand All.
For fully expanding sections, you can also Alt+Click on the disclosure arrow to the left of the document icon, or use the Alt+RightArrow shortcut. That latter can be used on a multiple selection, so another option to expand all in this case is to use Ctrl+A to select everything in the outliner, then Alt+RightArrow to fully expand each of the folders.
Thanks to all who have tried to help me. The last comment about clicking inside the outline as opposed to clicking on the heading above the outline worked to expand the contents with the synopsis for each chapter showing.
Itâs still not the method where I had used back in that older book written in 2018, but I had just taken one of Gwen Hernandezâs Scrivener classes, and it must have been some trick she showed in the class. Iâll go back through my notes to see if I can find it as I really like that way of viewing the folder titles and the contents of the synopsis.
Iâll include a screenshot of what it looks like now with the imported info from Plottr.
Your very first screenshot.
The synopsis is in the synopsis panel of the chapterâs parent folder ( â as an element in the binder). As any element, file, folder, file group, can all have their own synopsis in the dedicated panel.
Where here (in this new screenshot), the synopsis is rather attached to a file inside it.
Thatâs why you canât see it without expanding the chapterâs parent folder.
Take the synopsis text from your scene and paste it into your chapterâs parent folderâs synopsis panel and youâll get what you want.
It clearly can be seen that in your current case, the synopsis is in a file inside the parent folder. Not in the binder element that this parent folder is.
The icons even tell you so:
VS 
In other words: something you did in Plottr ended up creating a hierarchy level you didnât actually want/need.
All you have to do now, is to either move things where they belong and delete the useless files,
or, in case your parent folders are just empty dummies and the scenes inside them is what you whished would be top level, pull those scenes out of their useless dummy parent folder and then trash these unneeded folders, making your scenes as they currently are your new top level files. â The later probably your case, seeing how none of the files visible in your second screenshot actually have a body text, and consist solely of a title + synopsis. (I know this because of the icon. Should you have a body text in those files, the icon would be of a paper sheet, not of a cue card.)
. . . . . . . .
Unrelated:
For some reason your import from Plottr has all of your files (or seems to, from those I can see) excluded from compile.
You should fix that too, as otherwise you wonât be able to use session targets, and most of what is wordcount related.
(Youâll have to do it at some point, assuming youâll eventually want to compile , so might as well do it now before it causes you other issuesâŚ)
Thanks for that great explanation. I understand!
At this point, all I have is the outline. I havenât started writing the chapters, and I was just starting to set up my columns there for the things I care about, including POV, word count per chapter, and include in compile. (I used to have a carefully crafted Scrivener template using elements of many othersâ templates for my novels, but somehow Iâve lost it, so Iâm also trying to work out a new âMy fictionâ template along the way).
I was trying Plottr out to outline this new novel, but I only tried it based on the promise from the Plottr folks that once plotted, the outline could be ported over to Scrivener. Iâve already spent hours trying to make that happen.
To be honest, Iâm not sure I will do it again. Iâve used Aeon Timeline for the last 4 novels, but never tired to import it into Scrivener. It is easy to use it outside and alongside Scrivener. But the plot and characters need to be imported, and so far this has been very kludgy. I still have not been able to import the character profiles due to a weird issue where I created my characters attached to the series, but not to this particular novel. Thereâs no work around forthcoming.
Anyway, I know what I have to do to get my chapters to display the way I like. Thanks again.
I did try Plottr myself a while back (years ago). And, not that I had issues of any kind (I didnât play around with it long enough, perhaps), I quickly understood that I had no use whatsoever for it.
Nothing it offers/does that I canât easily get/do in Scrivener.
Ah, Iâd missed the real issue in my inept reading earlier, but it is possible to clean up the imported outline to better match the structure of your older project, if thatâs something youâre still after. Essentially, if I understand correctly, what you want is to remove all the âChapterâ folders and have the documents with title and synopsis directly within the Manuscript folder, yes? So replace this:
Manuscript
Chapter 1
I Aboard the Trequesta
Chapter 2
II Pearl Harbor
with this:
Manuscript
I Aboard the Trequesta
II Pearl Harbor
Hereâs a way to do that:
(Preliminary step 0: File ⸠Back Up ⸠Back Up To... to make a backup of the project before you move a bunch of stuff around, just to be safe!)
Ctrl+Shift+F to open Project Search at the top of the binder^(?!chapter).*$Ctrl+A to select everythingMove To ⸠ManuscriptCtrl+Delete to move them to the Trash.It looks long but itâs pretty quickly done. And although itâs rearranging, nothing is actually deleted, so if you accidentally put something in the Trash you could drag it out again. The main thing would be if the search in step 3 didnât return exactly what you wanted; you could tweak the search, or you could just do a little extra clean-up before step 7 to move any files that didnât get caught (the theoretical intentional item titled âChapterâ.)
We all âdidâ.
It only became known (as a part 2) once the OP had successfully expanded the outline.
Ah well, it was a long day/week; I wouldnât put it past me to have overlooked the key comment! 