Don't forget about the Grid Menu

Monday, January 3, 2011

Don't forget about the Grid MenuEvery now and then I get a question from a user that makes it clear they don't know about the Grid Menu. Do you?


At the upper left of almost every grid in Members Only there is a little file folder symbol.


Clicking this opens the Grid Menu:



Cut and Paste
This menu let's you do a bunch of useful things to the grid in question. Let's start at the bottom.
Copy Info into Clipboard lets you copy put the entire grid in the clipboard. Then you can paste it into Excel. Or anywhere else, for that matter. No need to go to the Query to export the data. Just cut and paste.

Of course, sometimes you will want to export a field in that table that is not showing in the grid. For example, the applied transaction grid in the Financial History form does not show the batch number. Use the final item in the grid menu, Select Fields for Copying to Clipboard, to pick the precise list of fields you want.

Finding Text
On a long grid, such as the Registration Grid for a well-attended meeting, you might want to search for a particular attendee. Click on Find First Text to do that. It will find the text where ever it occurs in the Grid, looking across all columns. You can use Find Next Text (or Ctrl-F) to find the next occurrence of the text.

Multi-Line Text
By default, Members Only shows only a single line of text in each grid row.  There may be cases where there is more text, and you would like to wrap it into multiple lines.
Here's one from our in-house version of Members Only, where we track your service requests:

 

Not a lot of the text shows in this grid... "I was wondering if" and "we would like" are tantalizing but don't give a lot of information. So let's turn on the multiline option:



That's more like it... now I get up to 255 chars in the cell, wrapping to as many lines as needed. And this is a sticky option - the program will remember each user's multiline preference for each grid.

The one choice we have not yet discussed is AutoSize columns. This option adjusts the width of all the columns to best display of the text, based on the width of the actual data. Don't use it in grids like the one above with Long Text fields... but everywhere else it can make the grid look quite a bit better. This setting is also sticky.







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