Hello,
I have broken down my project into documents that are anywhere from a few pages to a few sentences and key worded those documents, I am using the main binder as a place to group documents into related folders and then using collections to sequence those documents, so that I can cut back and forth between concepts, characters and locations. This is working well. but the problem I am having is that there is no way to tell the program to highlight all documents with a particular keyword in the current collection.
it is possible to do a keyword search, select all those documents in the search results and then say reveal in binder. it will show all the documents highlighted in the binder but there is no way that I have found to show them in a collection where you have sequenced your binder documents in an order you are testing.
The idea is simple, lets say I have a character and I want to see how they are disperse throughout the current collection. At present I can’t do that, it only tracks back to the binder not the current collection.
Any suggestions on how to tackle this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Reepicheep, I don’t think that that solves law’s problem, as he wants to visualise the distribution of a certain keyword character, location etc. throughout the total draft. I don’t see any way to achieve that other than in outline view with one column reserved for keywords — which maybe could be a solution to OP’s problem.
Yes matsgz is correct I want the multiple documents in a collection to highlight so that I can instantly see say the 10 of so places in that collection that a character makes an appearance in the flow of documents, in this way the collection becomes a sort of vertical timeline. I don’t want to extract documents out as a new search collection, I want to see their distribution within context of the current collection.
The problem with using the outline mode and a column with keywords is that my documents have multiple keywords and I would still have to manual go down the list and select/highlight the documents to see the characters distribution, when you have say 100 documents in a collection this becomes tedious to the point of not wanting to bother doing it. Unless I am missing something in your suggestion.
If you can live with doing this in a couple of stages, then it’s doable.
Create a label or status (labels are better because they can use colour, but statuses will work) with the same name as the character. Then do smart search for the particular keyword and save it as a collection, then give all documents in the collection the relevant label/status (highlight them in the binder and right click…). You’ll have to assign the status/label manually every time you add a new scene or want to search on a new character of course.
You can then see at a glance in the outline which scenes have that character. If you want to check when two characters are in the same scene, then have both a status and a label assigned to different characters.
Or more flexibly, if you want to retain labels and statuses for other things, then why not create 1 or more custom data fields (Char1, Char2 etc) and use them in the same way – once you’ve created them, they will be available in the outline view.
All this will take a bit of setting up, but it’s relatively straightforward and it will give you a bit of what it sounds like you want for the time being.
All of my documents that are going to end up being actual scenes have a TV icon applied to them. so what I am doing is a keyword search for a character and then in the search results I just select all and change those icons to a red flag in one go, and then when I go back to my collection where I can now I see the red flags spread throughout the collection. After I am done I go back to the keyword search collection and change them back to TV icons. Repeat as needed. A bit manual but it works fairly fast. I like the label suggestion also but I am using them for other things and so my label column is populated with lots of different colors. Having the red flags pop out amongst a sea of TV icons provides the visual clarity I need at the moment.
I would love it if the keyword hub had a button that said highlight selected keyword in current collection.
Thanks all for your suggestions,
If anyone else has other approaches I would love the hear them.
Suppose you have a saved collection that calls up all the docs with keyword ‘conflict’. And you want to see highlighted in it all the docs that also have the keyword ‘prot’.
Do this:
Call up the saved collection.
The search field will now be loaded with the search criterion for the saved collection. In the search field ADD the term ‘prot’. (Don’t delete what is in the field, just add additional search term.)
Select all the resulting docs that you get in the search result.
Now go back to the search field and delete the term ‘prot’.
Voila! You will now se in the binder area all the docs of you saved collection with the ‘prot’-keyword documents highlighted.
–gr
P.S. This only works if your saved collection and the additional criterion are of the same sort, e.g. both based on keywords.
gr - that is an interesting approach, I tried it and only problem is that my main collections are not based on a searches but are a collection of documents I manually selected and placed in a specific sequence.