Each iData datafile window contains a Toolbar, a Status Bar, and three main text areas, the Find Box, the Fields Area, and the Freeform Text Area.
Toolbar
The Toolbar contains a variety of buttons that duplicate functions that can be found in various menus. The purpose of the toolbar is to let you select those functions without having to go looking through menus, and without having to memorize command key combinations.
See Modifier Keys for Toolbar Buttons for information on using modifier keys (control, shift, option, command) with toolbar buttons.
The Toolbar can be modified to fit your personal
needs. See Customizing the iData
Toolbar to
learn how to
customize the toolbar to show only the particular buttons that you want
to see, or to change the order of the buttons that are shown. When
updating to a version of iData that adds new toolbar buttons, it may
be necessary to re-customize the toolbar in order to get the new
buttons to show up.
Status Bar
The Status Bar is a narrow horizontal area that sits between the Find Box and the Fields Area (see below).
At the far left, it shows the number of the
current
record. The record number is actually the title of a little button.
Click
on the record number to bring up a dialog that will let you go to a
particular
record by entering that record's number. (See Go To Record Number
to learn how this works.) The current record number is based on the
current record selection. (See the next paragraph.)
At the far right, it shows the total number of records in the datafile, along with the number of records currently selected for viewing. This text is actually the title of a little button. Click this button to bring up the record selection dialog. (See Selecting Records to learn about selecting records for viewing.)
Find Box
The Find Box is where you type text that you want to search for. (See the Find Sub-Menu help page for information on searching for text.)
The Find Box shows only a single line of text in a single style. See the Datafile Settings help page for information on how to change the font and point size used in the Find Box.To the left of the Find Box are three buttons. The appearance of these buttons can change, depending on how you have set the Find function to work.
The following shows the default Find setting. The buttons shown, from left to right, are Reverse Find, Toggle, and Forward Find.
Holding down the option key while clicking the
Toggle button changes its appearance. It flips horizontally, and
instead of having a small & inside the lens, it has a " inside and
another "
to the right of the lens. Option-clicking it again changes it back.
This version of the Toggle button also works to
toggle the Reverse Find/Select All buttons and the Forward Find/Quick
Select buttons.
To learn how the various buttons work, see the Find Sub-Menu help page.
Record Lock Button
To the right of the Find Box is the Record Lock button. This button works as a toggle.
The default setting is unlocked, in which case it appears as follows:
To lock the current record, click the Record Lock button and it will change as follows:
When the Record Lock button looks like this, the current record is locked. To unlock the record, simply click the button again.
A locked record cannot be edited. The locked status of each record persists when a datafile is closed.
Fields Area
The Fields Area is below the Status Bar, and shows the content of each field. Field content is displayed as cells in a table of horizontal rows and vertical columns.
If a datafile has one or more fields, it can be displayed in either of two views:
- List View shows the records as rows and the fields as columns. The name of each field is shown as a column header cell. The text in each cell may be selected for editing. The last column in List View shows the first line of text from the Freeform Text Area (see below). The text in this column is not editable, and clicking in it will cause the Freeform Text Area to become active. Each row in List View shows only a single line of text.
- Basic View shows a single record at a time. The field names are arranged as rows in the leftmost column, with the matching field content in the rightmost column. Each datafile can be set to have its Basic View rows always show a single line of text, or the rows can be set to expand to show all the text in the field, if it is too long to fit in a single row. See the Datafile Settings help page for information on how to set this option.
All cells in the Fields Area shows text in a single style. The font and point size used in the Fields Area can be changed in the Format tab of the Datafile Settings window.
Freeform Text Area
The Freeform Text Area is a text window, below the
Fields Area, that can contain multiple
paragraphs of styled text. (This means that, as in a word processor or
text editor,
different parts of the text can be set to display in different fonts,
point
sizes, styles, and colors. Tabs can be set and links can be inserted.
See the Text
Sub-Menu help page to learn how to learn more about the text
formatting features of iData.
There is a horizontal slider bar between the
Fields Area and the Freeform Text that can be moved up and down to
change the relative heights of the two areas. If a datafile has no
fields, and if you do not need to see the first line of the text of
multiple records in the Fields Area, you can move the slider all the
way to the top of the Fields Area.
To change the style of a block of text, highlight it using the mouse (or by using the arrow keys with the shift key held down), and select the desired formatting commands from the Format menu--including those in the Text submenu.
There are two ways to insert an image into the Freeform Text Area:
- Copy an image from any source and paste it at the cursor position.
- Drag an image file and drop at the desired location in the Freeform Text Area. The main types of image files that iData recognizes are JPEG (with the .jpeg file name extension), GIF (.gif), and TIFF (.tif or .tiff).
