Presently there is only a Select Duplicates. I’d like to see a Remove Duplicates which would remove all but a single (the first) record of each group of duplicates.
It can be done programmatically but non programmers should have access to this common need.
I’ve just never thought it was a good idea to have a command like this that deletes a bunch of data without any way to review what it is about to do, or know what it did afterwards, for that matter.
I’d agree with that position back before we had the Undo feature. Now could be the time to re-think that.
(It could say “Delete 4,509 records?”
Pano X currently offers ‘Delete Selected Records’ & ‘Delete Unselected Records’. This would not be much different from those.
For most, it is not intuitive to create a new field, set it to numeric, Sequence with Group attribute on, Select = 1, Delete Unselected, Delete Field.
I don’t think Undo really changes the calculus on this. To use Undo, you would have to immediately (or very soon) realize that there was a problem. In most cases, I don’t see how you could know that.
I think this is way different that delete selected and delete unselected records. First of all, I think it is generally much easier to know what you have selected. The whole reason you want this feature is because it is difficult to identify these records. Also, if you want, you can see exactly what records are about to be deleted. It’s your option.
If I ever did such a feature, I think it would be some sort of selection – a different select duplicates. Then you could review the record, and finally use Delete Selected Records to complete the process. But that is more of a project than I want to chew on right now.
Kind of like deleting a field that contains data that is not visible on the screen without some kind of warning…undo doesn’t do any good if you didn’t know there was data there in the first place.
@VGlassley Respectfully, I think it is quite different. It is trivial to do a selection to discover if a field contains any data or not (the easiest way, just right click on an empty cell and choose Select Different). With a hypothetical command that simply deletes duplicates, there would be no way to know what was about to be deleted, or what was just deleted.
By the way, in the previous discussion about this I thought you were asking for Panorama X to work the way Panorama 6 did, but I just checked and Panorama 6 does not warn you at all when you delete a field, whether there is data in it or not. It’s just BAM and your field is gone, and there was no undo either. So I think Panorama X is a big win over Panorama 6 in this area.
What might be nice is if there was a notification that told you that a field was deleted, and it contained XXX non-blank cells. But if you’re going to do that, really ANY command that modifies multiple records should do that. For example a formula fill could tell you that “47 of 823 cells were modified”. That could be quite nice for a future enhancement, and by using a notification, it wouldn’t break the flow of work. I’ve gone ahead and entered this in the issue tracker database, so it won’t be forgotten, but it could easily be a year or more before I get to this.
It certainly warns me:
I thought it did warn also, but for some reason it isn’t happening on my computer. I don’t see a preference for this. I’m not sure why I’m not seeing a warning.
It’s this one:
For some reason I don’t have the latest build of Panorama 6 on my computer – my copy doesn’t have that option!!
I checked out my version of Panorama 6 and if I try to delete a field with any data, even one record I get “Are you sure you want to delete this field? You will not be able to UNDO this operation.” message. I did some testing and found out that happens because the “Warn before deleting data from multiple records” checkbox is checked in preferences.
Any warning/notification pre or post operation would be a welcome addition. Thanks Jim
Vic Glassley