TUTORIAL: Scrivener 3 Folders and Text Documents

Woohoo! Let’s talk about Scrivener!

Hey friends! I'm so excited to bring my Scrivener tips and tricks to you! Scrivener can be pretty daunting, but it's such a great program with so many features!

Scrivener Tutorials Playlist

PDF coming soon!

(sign up HERE to be notified when it's available!)

This video today is all about the Folders and Text Documents features. These are all pretty great, so pay attention!

In this post, we'll go through the following topics:

Folders

Creating New Folders

Renaming Folders

Creating New Text Documents

Renaming Text Documents

Coloring Backgrounds in the Binder

Section Types (Again!)

Folders

Folders are a way to organize your chapters, scenes, and so on, within Scrivener. They function basically the same as folders on your computer desktop do, and the way folders in real life do. You stick documents in them!

Creating New Folders

Click next to the green plus sign at the top of your Scrivener window, and you'll get this dropdown menu. Select New Folder and boom! You'll get a new folder!

Make sure you're selected to a place in the Binder where you want the new folder to go.

For example:

On the left is prior to adding a new folder. You can see me selected to the Books folder. When I add a new folder, the one that pops up in on the same level as the original selected folder, as you can see on the right.

So when you're creating a new folder, click on whatever folder or document that's on the same level and above where you want your new folder to be!

Renaming Folders

Renaming things in Scrivener is pretty dang easy! You just double-click on the folder or text you want to rename, and then you can! Badda-boom!

Creating New Text Documents

Up at the top of your Scrivener window (circled in RED below), you can click on the green plus and get an immediate text document!

You can also click the down arrow next to that green plus, and you'll get this menu. You can add new text here.

Make sure you're selected in the correct place in the Binder so your new text shows up in the right spot!

Example:

Unlike the new folder process, for a new text document, you want to be selected to the folder in which you want the new document to go.

Below on the left, I'm selected to the Books folder. When I make a new text document, you can see on the right that it nests inside that folder, rather than making a document on the same level (like the new folder option does!).

Renaming Text Documents

You do this the same way you rename folders! Double click and type away!

Coloring Backgrounds in the Binder

If you want your files and folders to be all colorful in the Binder, this is how you set that up!

These colors are determined by what you've set up in the Labels menu, which is discussed here!

Section Types (Again!)

Section types! I'm going over them again because they're SO IMPORTANT when you're trying to compile!

You can see all your section types laid out in the Outliner View, pictured below.

In the Metadata Tab, you can manually assign your documents a section type. BUT! I don't recommend manually assigning these. Using the Structure-Based preset is smart, because Scrivener usually knows what it's doing here! Leave the section types as structure-based until you've gotten some experience compiling things, and then you can start tinkering here.

If you click on the Edit... option at the bottom of the menu, you'll go to this window. This is where you can delete or add new section types! Click on Default Types by Structure, and...

... you'll see this window! Here you can click on the different levels of documents and see in your Binder (highlighted in yellow) where those appear. This is handy for figuring out how everything is going to compile! And here you can make changes to the entire document level. So if you want your Root Files to be Chapters instead of Sections, this is where you changed that!