Scrivener 03: Splitting documents + drag & drop between projects.

You can download the file here: https://www.lumpsumsaga.com/downloads/Cultural_Universals.zip

Transcript

Howdy. Greg here.  I wanted to quickly show you how I went about creating a cultural universals folder to use with the world-building series I just launched.

I had an original source document in Excel that I used with my classroom. I just copied the text from there, went over to my Scrivener file and then selected “Paste and match style.” That version of paste is actually important here because we don't want any of the Excel rows and columns in this case. 

Now that we’ve got my text in here, I want to split this single document into a set of separate documents. To start, I selected the text I want to be the title of the new document, in this case, the word clothing, and then selected “Split->with  Selection as Title.”

Using the menu repeatedly can actually be tedious on something like this. Instead, select the title text and use the keyboard shortcut Command-option-shift-K. 

We are almost done. See how the title of the Art document is in italics. This means that a title has not actually been given to the document yet. Scrivener is showing the first line of the content inside the document as a default.  We want to fix that and give it an actual title. 

The next step is organizing all of these separate documents into a folder. Select all of them in the binder by selecting the first document, holding down the shift key, and selecting the last document. The list should now be highlighted. Right-click and choose “New folder from selection.” Click on the title and name the folder “cultural universals.” Now we have a folder that contains each of those topical documents that we can use for stashing research while world-building. 

To finish here, I want to show you a super useful feature of Scrivener that I only recently discovered. I don't know why I didn't know this sooner, but you can drag and drop content from project to project. And so in this case, we're going to go into our main comic script file we created the other day and just drag our new cultural universals folder into the research area. 

And that's that.