Each iData 2 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 Chapter 1-4 for information on using modifier keys (control, shift, option, command) with toolbar buttons.
The Toolbar can be modified to fit your personal needs. See Chapter 2-48 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.
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 Chapter 2-49 to learn how this works.)
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 Chapter 2-38 to learn about selecting records for viewing.)
Find Box
The Find Box is where you type text that you want to search for. (See Chapter 2-5 for information on searching for text.)
The Find Box shows only a single line of text in a single style. The font and point size used in the Find Box can be changed by selecting Change Font for Find Box in the Format menu.
To the left of the Find Box are the Reverse Find Button and the Forward Find Button.
Fields Area
The Fields Area 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.
- Basic View shows a single record at a time. The field names are arranged in the leftmost
Each cell in he Fields Area shows only a single line of text in a single style. The font and point size used in the Fields Area can be changed by selecting Change Font for Fields in the Format menu.
Freeform Text Area
The Freeform Text Area 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, and can be set to .)
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.
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 2 recognizes are JPEG (with the .jpeg file name extension), GIF (.gif), and TIFF (.tif or .tiff).
