I’m new to Scrivener, and so far I love it! I adore how you can effortlessly chop the files into scenes and organize you book, it’s such a time saver. I could go on and on about why I love it but I’m sure you heard all the praise before so I’ll get to the point.
I’ve found that by importing my book from docx that there is some minor additions to the file, in particular I’ve discovered multiple quotes “What?” he asked has become ““What?”” he asked, and It’s has become It’'s. Also, I’m a very wordy author, and working on trimming down common words that are easy to find with the search and replace function.
So my request is to allow searching in multiple documents, or tell me how to do this and I’ll be a happy little author, preparing to get published.
Edit: I figured it out by going over the intro video again. When I click on the folder I got to click on the view sub documents as Scrivenings button on top. My apologies, I wasn’t paying proper attention the first time I watched the video. Thanks for reading. I’ll leave this post up for the mods to decide what to do with it.
Welcome to the forum! It’s great to hear you’re enjoying Scrivener so far–and that the introductory video helped you out. Two additional notes on this:
The project search field from the main toolbar will search all the documents in your project, bringing up a “Search Results” list in the binder (which you can close by clicking the “x” in the binder footer or in the search field). Clicking the magnifying glass icon in the search field will give you a host of options for limiting the search. Once you’ve run the project search, you can click on the documents from the results collection and the search term will be highlighted within the main editor. You can also then select all the results to load them together as a Scrivenings session and use the document Find/Replace.
There’s also Edit > Find > Project Replace, which will work the replacement in all the documents of the project. It can be useful, but be sure to take care how you make the replacement so you don’t replace all instances of “Han” with “Scoundrel” and up with “Soundrelds” and “tScoundrelk” and so on. The project replacement can’t be undone, so I suggest making a full project backup first with File > Back Up > Back Up To....
If you have Microsoft Word 2007-2013 installed, you can switch to using its libraries for the conversion when importing into (and exporting from) Scrivener, and that should fix the double quote issue you’re seeing. Go to Tools > Options, select Import/Export, then “Import Converters…”. Choose “DOCX” from the drop-down menu on the left, then the “Microsoft Office” from the converter list on the right. I suggest doing the same for the “DOC” format, and for both of those and PDF under “Export Converters…” . Overall that should give you slightly better results when working with Word.
thank you for your reply. It’s much appreciated. I wound up going to the root folder, and viewing the document then searching to get rid of the double quotes.
I do have one more search related question. I need to highlight all instances of certain words to flag them for removal or editing. For example, My characters look around far too much, so I would like to highlight every instance of “look” with a pink color. Is there a way to do that?
Also, Ive been looking for a way to change the chapter numbers dynamically, just in case I decide to redo them. Is there a way to insert the folder name or chapter number into the title note? All that I’ve found seems rather confusing to me.
I need a tutorial on searching all folders and documents. I’m running Scrivener for Windows 1.9.0 on a laptop running Windows 7. What do I do after I click Edit >Find>Project Search.
I have been using WriteWay Pro for the past three years, and I have found it to be a whole lot more intuitive. My take on Scrivener Pro is that it tried to be all things to all people and is unnecessarily complicated. I have great difficulty believing that anyone has ever published a best seller with this product. I think the majority of Scrivener users are NANOWRIMOers who get it for half price.
and wait until it loads, it can take a while. once this screen appears, which takes a moment, and looks weird for a couple seconds, I can search for the word “look” using the normal search function
Now I can keep looking for all the Looks in the entire book and decide if there’s too much looking around, which is one way to trim down the word count. Search for the word-loss diet on amazon by Rayne Hall for some outstanding tips on reducing your word count.
Two additional notes on this:
