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When I use Scrivener I tend to have quite a deep hierarchy of documents. Often, I'll use a child document for notes that I will write up in its parent document.

Currently, when I view by project in Group Mode, the word count of every sub-document is included in the "Total Words" column for a given document. How can I change this so that certain sub-documents (e.g., the "notes" documents described above) are excluded from the "Total Words" column?

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because you should post your question on the Scrivener forum, not here.
    – S. Mitchell
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 18:10
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    I have posted there, and have got no answer. I only posted here because there seemed to be other Scrivener related questions, and no other SE site seems to cover the subject. If it has to be deleted then fair enough, but please delete the other questions and the "scrivener" tag, too.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 18:11
  • I've never used Scrivener, but this question answer mentions something about a checkbox for "Include in Compile" in the Notes Inspector. Does that do anything? writers.stackexchange.com/questions/6425/…
    – Yee-Lum
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 20:27
  • Unless you count 'Exclude a document from word count' I can't find a post on the forum that covers what you ask.
    – S. Mitchell
    Commented Nov 3, 2015 at 20:37
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    @Tave you could apply that logic to the majority of questions with a scrivener tag! I might be wrong but personally I don't see a problem with this question (though I may just raise it in meta)
    – Michael B
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 11:59

1 Answer 1

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I found this blog post which might offer some insight. There are several things which differ between Scrivener for Mac and Windows (at least, it think there are), though they're very close. It might help you locate the information you want.

You can change what Scrivener is counting to a degree (quote from the post):

If you want to modify how your statistics are calculated go to Project->Project Statistics and click options.

Hope that helps get you going in the right direction at least.

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    Thank you! I am able to change how the Project Statistics are calculated, and this gives me an overview word count. What I am specifically interested in is Scrivener's "Group Mode", which shows all the documents that make up a project in a table. That table can be customised to include various word counts, but I can't see how to control whether the "total word counts" that can be added to that table can be modified so that certain documents are counted, and others aren't.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 15:16
  • I think, @Jim, you can select just the text files from the binder you want to include and get the word counts from there. But that's a manual process. Does that help any?
    – Josh
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 17:18
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    Thanks @Josh -- you're quite right; I can select documents from the Binder column and then "Project Statistics" will give me separate data specifically for the documents I've selected. However, I'm specifically interested in whether I can select which documents will get included in the "Total Word Count" column in Group Mode. It's useful to be able to select documents in the Binder column and get a selective word count that way, but it gets fiddly when you have a lot of documents -- especially when you have a lot of nested documents.
    – Jim
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 17:22
  • Yeah, the manual way is a PITA, @Jim. Sorry I can't be more helpful. I'm a relative newbie with Scrivener, and never dove deep on any of its features.
    – Josh
    Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 17:25
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    I would also recommend Collections. You can either have search based collections that will include a saved search result or manual collections where you put the documents you want to see. However, you may also want to use comments and/or document notes/project notes for places to put notes that will be excluded from stats, even in group mode.
    – Erk
    Commented Dec 14, 2016 at 3:52

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