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December 8, 2023 By Karen Kenjosian

How-to Guides, In-App Tours, and Toolbar Demos

At Scrible, we aim to enhance your research and writing process through intuitive and helpful tools. Our How-to Guides, In-App Tours, and Toolbar Demos are designed to assist you in navigating and utilizing Scrible’s features effectively. This article provides an overview of these resources, ensuring you can make the most out of Scrible’s offerings.

How-to Guides

Scrible’s How-to Guides are a comprehensive resource. They offer several advantages:

Updated Interfaces: Reflecting current Scrible interfaces and product changes.
Expanded Topics: Covering a wider range of topics to meet diverse needs. As Scrible continues to add features and functionality, the library of How-to Guides will increase to reflect those changes.
Concise and Focused: These guides are succinct, tackling one topic at a time for easy understanding.
Responsive Webpages: As responsive webpages, these guides automatically adjust to your screen whether you are on a PC, tablet, or phone. Which means you can get help on the go.
Personalization: Guides are grouped and displayed based on your user profile and plan, ensuring relevancy and usefulness. For example, if you’re a student on our free Edu Plan, you’ll be shown the student guides for our Edu Plan. If you’re a teacher, you’ll see How-to Guides (Edu Pro Plan Teachers) under your Help menu. Selecting that will navigate you to a page listing Guides for Edu Pro Teachers. From there, you’ll see the list of guides relevant to you and can click on any of them to view the particular guide of interest.

In-App Tours

Our in-app Tours provide step-by-step, contextual guidance on using Scrible’s features. As with our How-to Guides, this is ongoing effort. Our library of in-app Tours will grow over time and cover more interfaces and features. To find the Tours, go to the Explore tab at the top of your Scrible screen.

Be sure to check out our New User Tour for an interactive and comprehensive introduction to all Scrible offers. It’s a great way to get started and make the most of our tools and features!

New Toolbar Demos:

To further aid your understanding, we have introduced Toolbar demos. These demos provide a hands-on experience, allowing you to explore the functionalities of the Scrible Toolbar in a practical, user-friendly environment. They are designed to complement our existing How-to Guides and in-app Tours, providing an immersive learning experience. To access the list of demos, go to Explore>Chapter 1: Getting Started Tour>The Toolbar (Demos), then select the demo you would like to view.

Whether you’re a student, educator, or researcher, Scrible’s How-to Guides and in-app Tours, along with our new Toolbar demos, offer valuable resources to streamline your experience. Dive into these tools to enhance your efficiency and mastery of Scrible’s robust features.

-The Scrible Team

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January 31, 2023 By Karen Kenjosian

Introducing Scrible Tip Tuesday

Tip Tuesday is something new! On Tuesdays, we’ll send a brief tip to help you get the most out of Scrible, discover features you might’ve missed, and learn tricks to maximize the ones you love. We might even include tips on streamlining your research workflow, improving your writing process, and more. Please let us know what kinds of tips you want!

Today’s Tip: Pin the Scrible Extension in Your Browser

To avoid Scrible being “out of sight, out of mind,” pin the Scrible Extension in your browser so it’s visible and you remember to use it. Learn how to do this for your preferred browser here:
How to Pin the Scrible Extension in Chrome
How to Pin the Scrible Extension in Edge
How to Pin the Scrible Extension in iPad Safari
How to Pin the Scrible Extension in Mac Safari

High fives ,
Team Scrible

December 7, 2021 By Scrible

Scrible Gets a New Look and Layout

We’ve given the Scrible Library a makeover and made other improvements throughout the system!

Updated Design

In addition to an overall move to a brighter, white interface, we’ve made dozens of smaller changes to buttons, fields, messages, windows, tooltips, icons and layout for design consistency to give the Scrible Library a more modern look and feel. We’ve also made numerous improvements to give the Scrible Toolbar and accompanying On-Page Sidebars more breathing room (e.g. more padding/spacing in dropdown menus) and make them easier on the eye (e.g. larger color swatches and text size in dropdown menus).

Consolidated Library Sidebars

We now have a single sidebar area on the left of the Library to display each of the available sidebars (Libraries, Tags and Annotation Key) one at a time since there’s no great need to have two of them open simultaneously. This simplifies the interface and eliminates the previously possible busy layout in which you could have the Libraries Sidebar open on the left and the Tags Sidebar or Annotation Key Sidebar open to its right. Now, each of those is only viewable one at a time. All sidebars can be collapsed when not needed to give you more screen space to view the contents of your Library.

**New Add from Sources Sidebar and Button**

Under the Bibliography Tab and Outline Tab, there used to be a Sources Sidebar on the right that would display your sources and allow you to add citations to your bibliography and annotations (e.g. highlighted evidence) to your outline, respectively. That sidebar now appears on the left as the new Add from Sources Sidebar. It still works the same way. It’s just folded into the new consolidated sidebars area on the left. When you’re in the Bibliography Tab or Outline Tab, you can open/close this Sidebar using its own tab. When its closed, you can also open it by clicking the new Add from Sources Button.

**Outline Editor with *Add from Sources Sidebar* open**

Source Description Back in the Library

We’ve brought the Source Description back to the Library so you can see a brief helpful blurb about each source there. These descriptions have always been available, but were not displayed alongside each source in the Library.

Remember that you can enter/edit the description for a source in 2 places – in your Library and in the Information Sidebar on a source (e.g. webpage or PDF). In your Library, click the Information Icon at far right of the source entry to display the Information Window, where you can enter/edit the description. When viewing a source, click the Information Sidebar Tab on the right to view the Information Sidebar, where you can also change the description field.

You can enter your own description for webpages and PDFs. We automatically provide one for books. When there’s no description, we show a preview of the first annotation (if there is one) in place of the description.

**A description for each source is now visible in the Library**.

Flipped Citation Editor Layout

The Citation Editor layout has also been updated. The autogenerated citation is now found at the bottom and the the constituent fields that make up the citation are at the top. This is intended to draw your attention to those fields so that you’re more likely to check them and see if they require your attention. We hope that helps build the good habit of double checking the fields to ensure citation accuracy.

Remember that the Citation Editor is viewable in multiple ways, including (a) by clicking the Citation Icon at the far right of a source entry in the Library, (b) by clicking the Citation Icon to the left of a citation in your bibliography in the Bibliography Tab and (c) in the On-Page Citation Sidebar when viewing a source.

**Autogenerated citation at the bottom of the Citation Editor**

Updated Browser Extension Button

The buttons for our Chrome and Edge browser extensions are now updated to a teal color that matches our current logo and is frequently used throughout our interfaces. If yours hasn’t changed yet, it should automatically update in the next few days. New button color; same great features!

**New Scrible browser extension button design**

New On-Page Sidebar Tabs Panel

The tabs for sidebars that accompany the Toolbar on right side of a webpage and in our PDF Viewer are now all visually grouped together in a single panel. On a webpage, this panel can be moved up and down using a grip area at the top and bottom of the panel in case it’s blocking underlying content.

You’ve always been able to move the Toolbar on webpages using the grips on either end.

**Sidebar tabs can be moved vertically on an article to uncover underlying content**.

Updated PDF Page Zoom and Navigation Controls

In our PDF viewer, we’ve consolidated the page zoom options in the Toolbar into a single dropdown menu and moved the page navigation controls to the Pages Sidebar (f.k.a. Thumbnails Sidebar). This declutters the Toolbar a bit and sensibly unifies page navigation with page thumbnails.

Page zoom and navigation controls updated in the Scrible PDF Viewer

We hope you like the makeover and that it helps you work more efficiently and effectively. As always, if you have any questions or run into any problems, please let us know!

February 16, 2021 By Scrible

Scrible Improves Support for National History Day

Building on our existing support for annotated bibliographies, we’re excited to announce new citation management features to improve support for National History Day (NHD) projects. NHD rules require citations to be grouped as primary and secondary sources within the bibliography.

So, we’ve added a new option in our Citation Editor to allow students to designate each information source as a primary or secondary source. Sources without either option selected are treated as secondary sources.

In our Bibliography Editor, we’ve added the option to split the bibliography into primary and secondary sources. Students can toggle between a standard bibliography and the new split bibliography simply by checking or unchecking the Split primary/secondary sources checkbox.

Finally, in Scrible Writer, our Google Docs Add-on/Microsoft Word Add-in, we’ve added the option to split the bibliography into primary and secondary sections. We’ve also added the option to use the annotated version of a bibliography in the document simply be checking a new Annotated Bibliography checkbox.