Additionally, each column has a more advanced ‘Custom Filter’ dialog which allows filter criteria such as less than, greater than, regular expressions and more. Given this, we wanted to make it even easier to filter on a particular column (and any value) by just right-clicking a cell.

In the above screenshot, you’ll see the new grid context-menu. Clicking ‘Filter by Selection’, you can add a filter to the column for that cell’s value. ‘Filter Excluding Selection’ will filter out that cell’s value from the column. ‘Remove Last Filter’ acts as an undo – so you can quickly get rid of the last applied filter. And then you can remove all the filters from the grid with ‘Remove All Filters’.

This feature (along with many others) will be a part of ReadySuite v4.1 – which will be available in February.

First up, we’ve added the ability for you to specify data types for custom fields (aka metadata). An immediate benefit of this feature is how we allow you to sort and filter on columns in the grid. See illustration below – you can now filter on a date column by year, month and day.

In addition, date columns will be correctly sorted by oldest to newest or vice versa. Initially, we’re going to support the following data types: Boolean (Yes/No), Number, Decimal, Date, Time, Date/Time, Text and Memo. Other enhancements to the grid will allow you to correctly summarize number/decimal columns, see a checkbox for boolean types, and make coding changes using specialized editors in each cell.

With this change, we’ve added a new ‘Modify Fields’ dialog. Here you’ll be able to add, modify and delete fields. You can set a field to read-only mode by setting its Locked property, preventing accidental changes made to that field.

Fields will also support an export mask. This is particularly useful for Date fields. For example, if you specify an export mask on field ‘DATESENT’ and the date you imported was ‘2011-11-02’, on export you’ll be able to retrieve it as ‘11/02/2011’. You can specify export masks for Boolean, Date, Time, Date/Time, Decimal, and Number fields.

Further to supporting custom fields, we added an option to re-adjust the internal DOCID field. Using the Modify Fields dialog, you can set any field as the internal DOCID field.

In our next post, we’ll discuss how we’re adding support for saving projects.

In prior versions, during the import process, you would specify the field from your CSV/DAT file that would “link on” to the document identifier in the grid. We did not provide a method for you to change the field to link on in the data already imported. In the screenshot below, you can see we added an option to specify the “Link Field” – this is populated from all the fields available in the main grid display.

If you’re familiar with the old wizard interface, you’ll also notice we’ve cleaned up the display quite a bit. At the top, you can determine whether you want the wizard to add “new documents” or error if it is unable to link-to existing documents. You’ll also see the “Queue” – this is populated based on the number of documents already in the grid display. In case there is a filter applied, you can glance at the numbers listed there which indicate the available set of documents being updated.

Appending your import to data already in the grid is also a bit more streamlined – you can specify the separator field now. Further, if the value you’re appending is the same as the current value – that data won’t be added, preventing duplicate information.

Finally, one common request we’ve had is to allow duplicate entries to be processed from the delimited text file. In the past, if a document was listed two or more times in your import CSV/DAT file – only the first instance of that record was updated. This was a conscious decision, allowing the import process to read the data in and update the grid faster. We now allow you to decide if you want the duplicates to be processed. Benefit of doing so, combined with the append feature, allows you to keep multiple entries and different updates from your import file.

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.