The Outliner in Deckle

See your whole manuscript at a glance, as editable index cards or as a detailed spreadsheet-style list, without opening each chapter individually.

What You Can Do

• Switch between Grid view (one card per chapter/scene, similar to what other apps call a corkboard) and List view (spreadsheet-style rows).
• Edit each card's synopsis directly in Grid view, without opening the document itself.
• See word counts that roll up through your structure: a chapter's total includes its scenes, a Part's includes all its chapters.
• Filter by document type, Label, Status, or linked Codex entries (selecting more than one Codex entry filters for any match, not just one at a time).
• Add your own custom columns in List view (Text or Dropdown) for tracking anything without a dedicated field.
• Drag documents to reorder them directly from either view.

How to Use the Outliner

1. Open the Outliner from the main navigation.
2. Switch between Grid and List view.
3. Use the filter controls to narrow by type, Label, Status, or Codex entries, or search directly.
4. In List view, add a custom column via the column menu if you want to track something Deckle doesn't already have a field for.

Grid vs. List

• Grid: one card per document, with an editable synopsis right on the card. Best for a visual, spatial sense of your story's shape, similar to what Scrivener calls a Corkboard, though Deckle doesn't have a separately named mode for it; it's the Grid view of the same Outliner.
• List: one row per document, with support for custom columns. Best for tracking metadata across many documents at once, like a spreadsheet.

A Couple of Things Worth Knowing

💡 Custom columns only exist in List view, by design. They'd clutter Grid's visual card layout, so they're kept to the view built for structured data.

💡 Grid view's column count can be pinned to a fixed number, or left responsive to auto-fill however much width is available.

💡 Word counts roll up through your structure. You don't need to add up chapter counts by hand to know a Part's total.