Knowing which chapters are still a rough first draft and which are polished and done is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to lose track of in a long manuscript. Status is a color-coded field built specifically to track that, separate from anything else you're already using to organize your book.
What You Can Do
- Assign one status to any chapter or scene, from a fully customizable list.
- Create, rename, recolor, and delete your own statuses.
- See status as a colored dot in the Binder, or a dedicated, sortable column in the Outliner.
- Filter the Outliner down to everything at one stage, every chapter still marked "First Draft," for instance.
How to Use Status
- Select a document, open the Inspector, and use the Status dropdown to assign one, or choose "None" to clear it.
- To manage the list itself, click the pencil icon next to the Status dropdown to open the Metadata Manager.
- Type a name, pick a color, and click Add to create a new status.
- Double-click a status's name to rename it, or click its color dot to recolor it.
- Delete a status with the trash icon. The Manager shows how many documents currently use it before you confirm, and removing it just clears the status from those documents.
Deckle ships with five starting statuses: To Do, In Progress, First Draft, Revised, and Final, all the same neutral color at first. Recolor or rename any of them, add your own, or delete the ones you don't need. See tracking draft progress with Status for a full revision-pass workflow built around it.
A Couple of Things Worth Knowing
💡 A document can have exactly one status at a time, the same as Label. They're independent fields, so you can track two separate dimensions at once (for example, revision stage on Status, POV character on Label) without either overwriting the other.
💡 The five starting statuses all share one default color until you recolor them. Deckle doesn't guess a meaningful color-per-stage for you, since what counts as "further along" is genuinely a personal workflow choice.
💡 Status and Label are structurally identical but managed as separate lists. There's no shared "category" system underneath; they're two parallel fields, each with its own Metadata Manager tab, so a status and a label never collide or share values.
FAQ
Can I use Status to track something other than revision stage, like editorial approval?
Yes, the starting statuses are just a default. Rename, recolor, delete, or add to them freely to fit whatever stages actually matter to your process.
What's the difference between Status and Label?
They work identically: one value per document, customizable name and color, filterable and sortable in the Outliner, but they're separate fields managed separately, so you can use them for two different things on the same document at once.
Can I filter the Outliner to see only chapters at a specific status?
Yes, the Outliner's status filter isolates every document at one status, in either Grid or List view.