Power Edit powers up
The Power Edit feature, which allows you to change books in batches, has been improved. I added:- Alphabetize tags. A few people have been hounding me for this. The idea is to turn "dogs, zebras, apes" into "apes, dogs, zebras." If you want it, you want it.
- Delete books. Want to delete a whole bunch of books? Your whole catalog. Here you go.
- Find ISBN duplicates (under "Miscellaneous powers" or click here to do it). This is another long-running desideratum—to know your duplicates (and get rid of them). You'll see how it works if you use it.
posted by Tim at 9:55 PM
17 Comments:
Tim,
I am (cautiously) pleased at the introduction of the new feature for checking for duplicates. I'll not have the chance to make use of it fully until after I've finished work, but once I have I'll be seeing just how many of my stated duplicates it manages to pick up. Thanks.
LT: HoldenCarver
If you don't select any books, then try to use the Alphabetize (Alphabetise, sorry - NZ'er here lol) Tags function - it throws "fatal error (2)" at you.
Don't you just love error trapping? ;-P
Does that mean it won't change tag order in some odd fashion when you add tags in power edit anymore? I just spent hours putting tags back in order.
Looks very cool.
*heads off to play*
I love the tag alphabetization. It works great! Thanks Tim.
Sharon (SharonGoforth)
I just found this website (I'm in another country and was so happy to find it I started adding books by memory :) ). I love the new ability to alphabetize the tags and have already used the power edit!
Aquila dijo...
Does that mean it won't change tag order in some odd fashion when you add tags in power edit anymore? I just spent hours putting tags back in order.
Yes. I hate this. I reported the bug months ago and at one stage thought it was fixed but later found out that it was still there.
If it's not fixed, please fix it Tim! (:
Oh one other thing several people have asked for which belongs with this new group of functions, is tag replacing. Sometimes you want to replace all the "nobel prizewinner" tags with just "nobel" without having the tags move around which would happen if you deleted the old one and then added the new one.
MMcM: I'm quite confused by your post. It DOES do a fresh search. I just did it on yours, and it works as expected. If you show the ISBN column (perhaps I should force this), you can see that your books do in fact have the same ISBNs.
Hippietrail: The problem was that the order tags were stored in the database was not necessarily the same as the order they were entered. (This happens when deletes leave "holes" in the database, which later entries fill in.) It now pays attention to the order-of-entry when adding or replacing tags, but it hasn't gone back retroactively and resorted them by that.
So, if the order of tags on a book is right now, this may be just a "coincidence"--the underlying entry order being wrong. In that case, adding or removing a tag may expose the underlying order.
Going forward, however, tag-entry-order will be paid attention to, not database entry order.
How's that for an answer!
Oh, I fixed that bug (and a similar one if you attempt to delete no books). Thanks for the help.
For what it's worth: the first time I went to 'find duplicates', it showed me a random bunch of books, with no yellow highlights. Clicking 'recalculate' fixed the problem.
I've just noticed an oddity with alphabetizing tags. Capitalized tags will be listed first, regardless of alpha order.
Thus: "dorothy l. sayers, women's studies", but "Dorothy L. Sayers, biographies".
Thanks, I'm particularly happy with being now able to alphabetize tags and to see 100 books per page.
Very nice, thanks!
bluetyson
Grrrr. I was using the 'capitals sort to the front' to get my tags the way I want them, because I want the single/double letter tags at the beginning, and the descriptive tags after that. Now I can't do that.
Explain that to me a bit better? I can add a checkbox, maybe.
I have a lot of one and two letter tags - LC call numbers for the tag cloud experiment some of us Thingamabrarians were talking about on the Google Group. They are in caps to keep them sorted in the right place (all together), whereas my other short tags are in lower case deliberately. Sorting them to the front gives me a tag set for a book that looks like: P, PZ, children's, picture book, zebras (for instance). I prefer that to: children's, P, PZ, picture book, zebras.
If it's just one person, I think the answer is to sort them by hand. The system should have them "stick" now. Let me know if it doesn't work.
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