Manually select records for batch edit?

Panorama X
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Is there a way to manually select multiple records?

As I set up databases, I import a lot of data that needs a good bit of tinkering to get all the values correct, correct data-formatting, and correctly lined up in the appropriate fields. Panorama X has fantastic tools for much of this (e.g.: shift right, shift left, fill by formula, etc.), but they operate on the currently selected records (the ones showing in the data sheet) and in many cases there is no immediately available method for me to filter the data sheet to select only those records I wish to batch chance.

I have set up Yes/No fields which allow me, somewhat clumsily, to mark records so that I can select them with Find/Select. Is there a better way?

(I’ve worked with many image database programs. They have three levels of selection: filtered images (shown), selected image(s) (highlighted), and the “premium” image among the selected images (double-highlighted in some way). From this I glean that this “all/filtered/selected/single” topology is generally accepted and used. Might we see it in Panorama X? Afaict, we have “all/filtered/premium”, and are missing just the ability to select multiple records.)

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That is the best way to do this.

I’ve never heard of any general purpose database with that feature.

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It sounds like you could use 2 date/superdate fields. One would be Date Imported and another might be Date Cleaned. When you import your new records into the file, each of those fields would be empty. A part of your import process could then put today’s date in the Imported date field. When you then later took on the task to clean those records, you could select based on the Date Cleaned being empty and when you are happy with those records being cleaned, you could then fill the Date Cleaned field with the current date.
All of the above could be overkill and you can do less, but that is just an idea from what I heard you were wanting to easily do.

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Thanks Jim. I’m coming from (and specializing in) a world of image-specific databases (as a user), and carry along expectation from that experience. (So much so that it took be a couple of days to realize that “selected” in Panorama X is equal to what I had thought of as “filtered”. “Select All”, in image databases, selects all the filtered records. Cancelling the filter shows all records.) It is a necessary feature in image databases (filter for this, select many from those filtered), but the UI is all forms, and data sheets are rare. For Lightroom, for example, you need an independent developer-supplied plug-in to be able to see anything resembling a data sheet. The brilliantly-designed Aperture did show a data sheet — and allowed selection of multiple rows from a filtered set of records. (Aperture, alas, was killed by Apple in 2015.) An additional level of selection would be a welcome feature in a general-purpose database, imho. I would use it very often.

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Thanks Robert. If I understand correctly (really — I’m still stumbling 'round Panorama X like a far-sighted person who’s lost their eyeglasses), this isn’t quite what I need. I’m looking for a way to manually select records so that I can do some small-scale batch processing as part of cleaning up my imported data. I’d like a frictionless way to make an arbitrary, user-chosen set of multiple records selected so I can do the batch operation.

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This may not be sufficiently granular for you, but there is a “select within” feature in PanX that allows you to make subsets from a selection. These subselections can be nested to drill down into the data.

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