I have been reading the Manual although it’s been of little help. It’s quite ponderous and covers chunks of material at a time rather than a step by step which I believe would be more productive and helpful. At least for me.
I’m tiptoeing through the program and reading as much as I can find.
Recently, I selected three different chapters, one at a time. Went to Corkboard and created an index card with the Return key and wrote reminder notes for follow up.
The Binder showed a file beneath the respective chapters with a title I created for the card. When I returned another time to review my notes, which the arrow below the chapter showed to exist, the Corkboard was empty except for “Chapter XX contains no subdocuments.” So, my notes disappeared,
This is the sort of thing the interactive tutorial and the online videos are designed to teach.
Each document or folder already has one and only one notecard associated with it, which shows its title and synopsis if any. You see the current document’s note card at the top of the Notes panel of the Inspector, when it’s open. What Corkboard View shows you is a corkboard containing a notecards for each of the subdocuments or subfolders of the document or folder selected in the Binder. So there’s nothing on the Corkboard when the current document or folder contains no subdocuments or subfolders.
You can put working notes relating to a particular document or folder in the lower part of the Notes panel. And there are other places to put notes relating to your whole project.
There’s no way to associate a new note card with a particular combination of documents or folders, which sounds like what you were trying to do. The notes you took should still be there, on the notecard for the document or folder that was selected when you took them. The tutorial is clearer about this than I can be here.
Just in case it’s not clear, “the tutorial” is a scrivener project, created either when select it among the Scrivener templates when creating a new project, or from the Help->Interactive Tutorial menu. It’s just a project that you can read through, experiment with, and open and close whenever you want, picking up where you left off. When you’re done with it (or want a fresh copy), just delete the interactive tutorial project that you created.
The manual also has an introduction to Scrivener section, but the whole manual is so huge that I’ve never even considered reading it through.
With regard to the manual, and indeed it is huge and the tutorial, I respect that it would take some labor, but an interactive tutorial would be helpful wherein you went step by step creating a novel, for example.
Start here, do this, then do this, and eventually the key features would be covered.