Posted in New Features | Tagged as: grid, preview, readysuite, thumbnail, viewer | 1 Comment »
We’re now ready to end our Introduction to ReadySuite series with last minute improvements to the grid and overall stability. While we try to release bug free software every time, we’ve always built in a bug report mechanism in case our software crashes unexpectedly. These reports are submitted by our users and contain useful details surrounding the events of the crash. One of the most common bug reports we’ve encountered occurred right after an import. Although it was difficult to reproduce, we spent a lot of time improving the stability and responsiveness of the document grid.
A lot of changes to the document grid occur after an import. Thousands of documents can be imported, new custom fields added, and metadata field values updated. We’ve added a progress indicator so you can see things are working in the background. But don’t worry: our goal is for the process to be fast and seamless. In our testing, imports over 50,000 documents with new fields only take a few seconds to populate.
Our grid has always featured a way to view the thumbnails of documents in a separate window. While most documents less than a hundred pages would show almost instantly, one area we felt improvement was needed was showing thumbnails of very large documents. You might have waited over 15 seconds to view a 700 page document. Navigating documents took longer than it should as a result. We’re happy to say this is one area we’ve greatly improved: loading a 1,700 page document now takes less than a second! Additionally, the enhancements to the thumbnail explorer now prevent the software from hanging after an import when the first document contained many pages.
We’ve also made additional improvements to editing and sorting in the document grid, aiming to make editing in the grid more excel-like. For example, if you’re editing a cell and press the down-arrow key, the cell below it will be selected and you can start editing. The same applies for moving to the left and right as well. Similar to Excel, you can now highlight a range of cells spanning multiple columns. These values can then be copy and pasted into any compatible editor. For editable fields, you can cut values from the grid or paste them into it. If you need to copy and paste the values from one column to another, go right ahead. You can even copy and paste from an excel worksheet into the grid and vice versa.
Our sorting algorithm in the document grid has also been changed for text fields to sort more intuitively. Taking a look at the below table to see how sorting has been adjusted:
Columns will now default to this new natural way of sorting. You can even sort on multiple columns using the grid; just hold the shift key and select the columns in the order you wish to sort.
We’ve made a few other minor changes here and there. For example, when new columns are added to the grid they will show automatically. Previously, columns were hidden until shown by the user. The field chooser still lets you pick which columns to show and hide. Additionally, we’ve added support for Windows 7. When a long process is running, you’ll notice the progress bar in the taskbar. As we add more features, we’ll look into adding more support for Windows 7.
This concludes our introductory series to ReadySuite. We’ll update you next week as ReadySuite progresses from Beta to Gold.
Posted in New Features | Tagged as: batch update, delimited text, edd, metadata, readysuite | No Comments »
We’re about ready to wind down our Introduction to ReadySuite series with discussions geared towards enhancements to some of the core functionality. This post will focus on changes made to the import and export of delimited text.
First up, we’ll highlight how we’ve improved the import of delimited text files. One of most requested changes by our users was to allow new records to be created by this process. Previously, you had to link the delimited text import with an existing record (i.e. native and/or image based document). The benefit here was we could tell you which documents were “un-linked” or not found. Now you can add the record as a new document if it can’t be linked. If you don’t need to add these as new records, the option to generate a warning is still there.
We’ve also implemented an update-mode if the record already exists. You can choose to replace an existing field value or append the new value to the existing record. For example, if you had a field named PRODRANGES with the value “ABC001-ABC002” and a delimited text file with a PRODRANGES field having the value of “DEF001-DEF002”, the append mode would combine the values to be “ABC001-ABC002 DEF001-DEF002”.
Additionally, you can now choose to repeat the value of a field during the import delimited text process. If a field is marked to have its values repeated, any empty values will be replaced with the previous non-empty value. If you’re importing a FOLDER field whose value is only entered for the first document inside that folder, but you need it repeated for each document inside that folder, then mark the field to be repeated. The folder information will be re-used for each document until a new folder is encountered.
Moving on to exporting delimited text files, we’ve added the ability to export page records. When setting up the delimited text export, you can simply check a box to export all the pages or images in a document. Page level fields, such as filename, page number, folder and color status will be available. Document level fields will simply be repeated for each page in the document.
Group fields are now available to the delimited text export in addition to the EDRM and DII exports. This feature allows you to specify two or more fields to be “merged” on export in the event that one field does not have a value. This is useful if you have three fields called Author, From, and Creator but you only need one export field called Author. Based on the order you add the fields to the new group field, the first non-empty item will be used in the export field.
For those users who want to merge two or more fields together regardless of any existing data, we’ve added that ability to the Batch Update dialog. For example, if you want to merge BEGPROD1, BEGPROD2, and BEGPROD3 into a BEGPRODS field, you would use the following syntax:
${META:BEGPROD1}; ${META: BEGPROD2}; ${META: BEGPROD3}
Don’t worry if the above is confusing: we have an easy-to-use field picker to help in the process.
The changes highlighted in this post are also being provided to our ReadyConvert users, among other bug fixes, free of charge. ReadyConvert is our free load file verification and conversion tool used by many litigation professionals.
Our next blog post will focus on overall stability improvements and important changes to the document grid.
Posted in New Features | Tagged as: bates, edd, export, number, preview, readysuite | No Comments »
Document and page level numbering is the latest addition to our Introduction to ReadySuite series. This feature fits nicely with the discussed endorsing and exporting options. Utilizing the new numbering functionality allows users to re-brand existing image sets or create new production image sets. We let you easily create cross reference fields, use custom fields in the numbering scheme, and support a bates counter larger than 18 numerical digits with no limit in the prefix.
In page-level numbering, we divide the numbering scheme into three parts: prefix, separator, and counter. Typically the prefix value is static in content; however, we allow you to use one or more custom fields when building the prefix. For example, if each document being numbered has a field called “ExhNo”, you can use the document’s exhibit number in the prefix of each document. The separator lets you specify a character to put in between the prefix and counter. If no separator is desired, leave it blank.
The counter field allows you to indicate the starting number to use and the amount of leading zeros to pad. Entering “001483” in the counter field will yield 6 digits for each document, starting at 1483 and incrementing by 1 for each page until the end. Additionally, we allow you to reset the counter back to its original starting value for each document. Utilizing this feature lets you number each page in a document separate from the previous document.
In the above illustration, you can see we’ve defined two documents each with a unique exhibit number. Using the exhibit number field in the prefix, with 0001 as our counter and allowing the counter to reset after each document, would yield the above starting and ending exhibit numbers.
Generating cross reference reports is just as easy. At the time of numbering, we let you specify or create new fields to indicate the previous starting and ending document numbers. For example, if you are re-numbering your review set to create a production set, you can save the starting and ending review numbers in fields ReviewStart and ReviewEnd respectively.
As we inch closer towards releasing ReadySuite, we’re looking for a few additional beta testers. Contact Justin Blessing if you’re interested in joining our test team.
