Included in Celtx are reversible color-coded Index Cards, yet another type of assistant making your job as scriptwriter easier. Celtx ties these cards to the proper place in your script and puts the scene heading and first 40 or so words of the scene on this electronic "card." You flip the card on the screen to type notes and color code them to follow plot lines. You can also drag and drop them to move scenes around.

What does that mean? Something truly powerful! Let's see for ourselves.

At the bottom of the script window, click on the Index Cards tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

The script window is now full of blank cards; the numbers on the cards correspond to the scene numbers in our script.

This "side" of the cards may be thought of as the "back" (and is for our notes). Ah, then what's on the front? Click on the Show Script button just above the top row of cards. Blap! The cards flip over and we have every single scene in the script with the heading and the first few lines of the scene (the button's label changes to Show Notes. Click on it to flip back to notes).

Clicking on the Show Notes button flips the card back over, so that we can make notes about a scene.

Notice down in the extreme right hand corner of each card where it has Plot A. Click on this and we get the Pick a Colour dialog box (the developers of Celtx are headquartered in Newfoundland, Canada, so they use "colour" instead of "color"). This box allows us to color-code (or ever colour-code) the index cards. Thus we can more easily follow the threads of the different plots. More on this in a moment.

Now, move the mouse over the cards. A set of crossed double arrows appears (see the following screenshot, it's different on Mac being a hand instead of an arrow). Hold down the left mouse button and that card can be dragged to another location. Remember, earlier in this chapter when we learned scene management using the Scenes window over on the lower left of the Celtx script screen? We dragged the scene heading up and down and it moved the entire scene in the script. Well, shuffling these cards also moves the entire scene in the script!

Moving scenes around by moving these Index Cards is really a big deal, but beyond the scope of this book to explain. Let me suggest here a classic book about screenwriting, Save the Cat by the late and great Blake Snyder. It's still in print and readily available at an inexpensive price. In this book, Blake shows how we manually use Index Cards in rows to plot movies. The Index Cards feature in Celtx is a computerized facsimile of this process integrated into your scriptwriting software; that's why it's exciting and useful.