Is there a way I can auto fill the directory place.
I have 300 indexes from Portland and I'm hoping to auto fill so I don't need to type Portland 300 times. Thank you.
Best Answer
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Yes, you can type the Directory Place value in its Field in the first Entry and then click your cursor in that Field, and then click the “copy to like Fields” tool (6th horizontal icon from the right) - a fat down-arrow with horizontal lines. That will propagate that Directory Place value to the Directory Place Field in all the rest of the Entries. If you end up not needing all 300 Entries,, you can render the ones you don’t need back to being blank by deleting the Directory Place value in the first unneeded Entry, and use this same tool to blank that Field in the remaining unneeded Entries. Then you can use the trashcan icon to Delete “all blank entries.”
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Answers
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The second part of this answer is confusing to me.
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Hi Mary Anne. Sorry about that. I should have stopped when I was ahead.
Suppose you have 300 blank entries but only 162 records in your batch. When you get to the 162nd record and use that 162nd entry, what do you do with those extra 138 entries (from #163 to #300)? You need to delete them. You don’t want to do it one-by-one, but the trashcan icon gives you two options (1j delete the current entry or (2) delete “all blank entries.” Meanwhile, you up-front auto-filled all 300 originally blank entries with the Directory Place value, including #163 to #300, that you’d now like to delete. But they are no longer blank, so you can’t use “Delete all blank entries” to delete them. Here is the point of the second part of the answer: To make those 138 unneeded entries (#163 to #300) completely blank again and eligible for that “quick” delete option, delete the Directory Place value from the 163rd entry, making it completely blank again. Now use the “copy-forward to all like fields” tool on that now-blank Directory Place field in the 163rd entry. That will blank all those Directory Place fields in the remaining unneeded entries. So entries #163 to #300 are now blank again, and the trashcan option “Delete all blank entries” will work, and get rid of those extra entries, so you can QC and Submit if there are no errors.
BTW, if there had been a Directory Date available for your batch (I didn’t check whether there was), and you had used the “copy forward to all like fields” tool to auto-fill that field as well, then you would have needed to repeat the “cleanup” step for that Directory Date field too on entries #163 to #300 before being able to delete those unneeded entrees, because that Directory Date value would prevent them from being blank.
So, you use the “copy forward tool” twice for each field you use it on. Once to do what you really wanted to do (auto-fill), and again later to clean up the unintended consequences of the primary use of it. I hope that is a bit clearer. If not, please let me know.
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Thanks - This will save me much frustration the next time I auto fill a directory place!!! I'll have to admit it took 30 minutes to delete many, many unneeded entries on the batch I auto filled the directory place. 😂
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You're welcome, Mary Anne.
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Worked perfectly!!!
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