5.2.4  Datasheet View

 

 

Like Synopsis, Browse and List Views, you arrive at the Datasheet View via the drop-down menu under Manuscript Views.  Like List View, Datasheet View displays the records horizontally in a row, with as many rows per manuscript as there are records of its lowest present descendant, i.e. text.  It gives, however, every container of information of the three top levels —Manuscript; Part; Text (except that it omits the six URL-related fields and the three Subject fields)—, so you can count how many columns there are:  65 of them.  Good grief.  Don’t panic, though:  the total of required fields where you must enter data is 18.  Whew.  If you had been reading the Data Dictionary, you would have remembered that and not turned a hair.

Just in case you don't remember this one nifty feature of Microsoft applications, we'll repeat it:  if you put the cursor in the small blue square to the extreme left of a row, and if you click on it, the entire row highlights.  Then you can scroll horizontally all the way to the extreme right and still keep your place.  You also have the power in this View to resize the individual columns and to resize the entire Datasheet.

But unlike Browse and List Views, and like Synopsis, you can use this presentation of content to make editorial changes to the data:  you can add or edit data to extant cells (but if you intend to add entirely new families or descendants at any of the four levels you still have to use the offshoot command buttons on the Synopsis View). 

Even more handy is that you can use Datasheet View to reorganize the data for editorial purposes.  To make the context menu visible and functional for any particular column, put the cursor in that particular column, and right-click.  The menu that will thereby appear offers more than the usual choices, viz.:

5.2.4.1  Sort

5.2.4.2  Freeze

5.2.4.3  Hide

5.2.4.4  Find

5.2.4.5  Replace

5.2.4.6  Copy and Paste