One of the use cases for collections is to test a new order for your documents. This is what I need to do—completely rearrange my novel into a new order.
Let’s say I’ve used a collection to do just this, and it’s perfect. What is the next step? I want this now to be the sequence of my documents as shown in the binder, but I still have a lot more writing to do and want to do that within a hierarchy and using the full flexibility of the binder.
I don’t think there is any easy way to do this, is there? I’m really asking how the developers saw this feature being used. Is the idea to perfect your new order in a collection and then manually rearrange documents in the binder to match?
I’m not the developer, but I have an opinion. I’ve always thought of collections as an alternate view of the binder. For example, I write screenplays, and they can have a pretty strict structure. I use collections to show me all the scenes tagged as belonging to a certain subplot, or all the scenes where Character A and Character B have lines together without disturbing the Binder order..
Sure, I get that, and it can be useful. But as the manual says, you can use collections to “Experiment with an alternate scene flow without disrupting the original layout.” Okay, I’ve found my improved scene flow and want to run with it. What do I do? If the only recourse is to manually rearrange the binder based on the collection, I wonder if it would be more expedient to drag scenes to a new scrivener project instead? Then, when I’ve found my ideal order, I’m ready to continue writing.
See Section 10.2.5 in the manual. The short answer is that you select the collection and drag and drop back to the Binder, but there are a few different ways to handle potential duplicates and things like that.
I made a mock project with scenes in folders, then added everything to a collection.
I think what I figured out, and it would be great to get confirmation from someone, is that this reorganization from a collection trick only works properly if you are working within one folder in the binder. So, say I have a Part 1 folder, and I want to reorganize 25 scenes inside of it, no problem. Just add all those scenes to a collection, move them around, and then move or drag and drop the collection documents into the same Part 1 folder in the binder. Presto, your scenes are in a new order.
But, unless I’m missing something, you can’t reorganize a draft folder that has several subfolders in one swoop. And you can’t add folders to the collection, or it gets really confusing, because they’re aliases to the original folders, and when you click on them in the collection, they show the subdocuments in the original wrong order.
If you try to drag a collection that includes both folders and documents into the binder, nothing happens, as far as I can tell.
I guess because I have two or three levels of folder hierarchy, with folders defining acts and sequences. If I use the corkboard, I can only look at one act at a time, but some scenes and sequences will move to other acts, so it’s hard to get the big picture.
However, I just gave it a try, and I realized you can use corkboard view but at the same time interact with the binder, so I can pull out a scene from a folder and drop it into a different folder in the binder. So this might be a more workable solution, thanks.
You can also have multiple views open simultaneously. So, for instance, you could use the Corkboard to make changes that you’re sure about, while also opening a Collection in an Outline view and moving things around. (I’d recommend using different views for Binder-based vs. Collection-based reorganizations, since Binder changes are permanent while Collection changes are not.)