Feature enhancement request

The Custom Text Export wizard is very nice with one exception. It is unwieldy to use when you have a lot of fields and only wish to export a few. It defaults to including every field. Panorama6’s, overall less capable incarnation, started with no fields selected for inclusion, but offered a “select all” button so one could start from the opposite. It also made it easier to select or deselect a lot of fields. I suspect adding “select all” and “select none” buttons to the wizard could be done without excessive programming and that would, at worst, cut the problem in half. Of course you’d need at least one item selected, eventually, for the result to make sense. Allowing multiple selections, analogous to those possible in openfile dialogs, would be dreamy. But that might require an interface redesign and probably would take lot of work. Plus, although helpful for those few of us with >100 field databases, a fancier interface might turn off would be adapters with more casual needs. Clearly that’s Jim’s choice. I defer to Jim’s judgement and schedule on the latter and don’t expect it anytime soon, but hope select all/none options make Jim’s list.

The Hide/Show Field menu has a similar problem. Although the cute animation in Help shows its list being easily clicked multiple times, I find an annoying redraw lag interferes when having many fields. Show all and Show None buttons could reduce our work without too much work for Jim. Or perhaps a 'Show Just Next Choice" button instead of ‘Show None’ to avoid empty selections.

For repeating lists of Fields, to export or to show, setting Favorites helps. I don’t see that their Favorites can be invoked programmatically by name, but similar functionality can certainly be created and reused via procedures. For repeating complex tasks that would be the easiest way and its toolbox is fine.

In the Text Export window, click the blueprint icon. You can then easily edit the text to quickly cut out most of the fields. Also, for tab and comma delimited you can easily write a custom procedure, for example

export "my file.txt",Name+","+Address+","+City+","+State

For Hide/Show fields, a quick way to do more or less what you want is to click on the first (leftmost) column, then choose Hide After Current Field. Now you’ll have only one field visible. Then you can open the Hide/Show fields dialog and quickly click to select a small number of fields.

Actually – that’s not necessary. Just open the Hide/Show fields dialog, click on the star, and choose Hide All Fields.

I can’t disagree that this lag is quite annoying. I think it will take some sort of complete rewrite of that dialog to resolve that.

Best asnwer possible. I don’t have to wait for enhancements; I just need to learn better what’s already there!