This utility actually contains five separate utilities. The first four, Areas, Organizers, Ratings, and Status allow you to fill in the Drop Down menus for the corresponding fields on the Main Data Screen. Direct data entry to those fields, like the Building, Department, and Title fields is not allowed. You may only pick values from the Drop Down menus while in Edit mode. For each of these items you will likely only fill in a few values. The User Defined Fields Page a llows you to define up to eight fields to accommodate your own specialized needs.

This fills the AREA field Drop Down menu located on the Names Group of the Main Data Screen. The intended use of this field is typically to organize your data into geographical or perhaps political groupings for Organizing.

When The Union Organizer is first installed, this screen will be blank. You add Areas by entering values in the New/Modified Areas Column - but you must always enter new values into a BLANK row. Entering a value into a row with a Present Area already filled in will REPLACE that Area on the Drop Down list AND replace all corresponding values in the Main Data with the new value. When you click the Close Button, all values will be automatically saved. The Present Areas Column will always show the present values and this column is always read only. If you want to DELETE a Pr esent Area rather than replacing it with another value, you would click the DEL column on the left at that row, marking it as deleted.

As you can see above, you may also assign an Organizer (from the list of Organizers from the list of people you assign on the Organizers Page (see below). When you edit or add records in Main Data this Organizer will automat ically be applied to the record when you enter the Area. See also: The Building List.

Changes made to these values, and the values on all the other utility screens, will automatically update the Main Data.

An example will clarify using this screen.

In the screen shown above, the Area Drop Down is filled with the values EAST BANK, WEST BANK, and NORTH BANK. Suppose you decide to add an Area called SOUTH BANK, rename EAST BANK to EAST SIDE and Delete NORTH BANK. You would enter the values like this :

Click on Close to save the changes (and changes on all other User Preferences pages). The next time that you run The User Preferences Utility you will see that the Present Areas are WEST BANK, EAST SIDE, and SOUTH BANK. If you view a record in Main Data that had an Area of EAST BANK it will now be EAST SIDE, and those that had Areas of NOR TH BANK will now have blank areas.

Click Discard Changes if you change your mind before closing.