Moving Records

[John Fineberg]

I’m not familiar with all of the terms you use in Tap Forms, but I’ll try to make my question clear here.

I have thousands of contacts (records?) in my database. Each one of them is in at least one category (which I think you call something else), such as “client,” “prospect,” etc.

Those so-called categories (my term, not yours) are in a list under my form called “contacts.” So a person might be entered originally as a prospect, but then they become a client.

I need to know how to 1) move that person into another category; and 2) I need to know how to leave that person in the original category, but also put him/her into a second (third, fourth, …) category, too.

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[Brendan]

Hi John,

In Tap Forms speak, your category is called “Contacts”, but also your Form is called “Contacts”. You also have a bunch of “Saved Searches” beneath the form name which are used to filter your records into a bunch of different groups. You can call them categories if you want, but it could get confusing with the regular use of the Category term. By default there were a few categories; Business, Personal, Miscellaneous, and Uncategorized.

You must have created those searches yourself to organize your contacts. To move a contact from one group to another you just need to change the value of the field which determines their grouping. The main form will always contain all contacts. The searches below will filter your contacts using the specified criteria within the Saved Search.

[John Fineberg]

Thanks for your reply, Brendan. I’m not sure what I’ve changed and what I’ve left as default. But, to get more into TF speak, were either or both of what I have labelled as Contacts originally called Contacts? If so, which one? Getting more back to default might make it easier to converse about what I want to do.

And, speaking of what I want to do, I don’t remember how I created these subdivisions, or “Saved Searches” (like “ARC Training Center Students” and such). So please give me more specific instructions on how specify that a person belongs in a particular search, or in a number of different searches. And how to eliminate a person from a search, or eliminate them altogether from TF.

[Brendan]

Hi John,

See attached image which shows you what a category, form, and where to go to create and edit saved searches. You did make quite a few of them already I see.

To move a record from one saved search list to another, just change the field value to whatever it would take so that the record would be found from the search rules as defined in one of your other saved searches.

Thanks,

Brendan

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[John Fineberg]

So, if I want to change someone’s status, such as from a prospect to client, how do I do that? Where is that “field value” located in an individual person’s record?

[Leo]

John,

make a textfield with the selection droplist (multiple selections possible). Fill that list with any status you need. From there on you can fill every status you want, multiple if you want.
And you can of course make saved filters for it.

Leo

[John Fineberg]

Okay, to be clear, I have 3,622 people in my Tap Forms, and I have 28 saved searches, so I’m not starting from scratch. Far from it.

As one who was quite proficient in ACT (the best of all contact management programs, until ACT stopped supporting Mac users), Eudora and Now Contact/Now Up-to-Date, all before discovering and converting to Bento, I’m not a rookie when it comes to contact management programs. I would never have left Bento if FileMaker had not pulled the plug on supporting it. But it did, and so we have to move forward with what’s currently available.

In my opinion, Bento was so much simpler and more intuitive to use than Tap Forms. This means asking questions that could appear to be ridiculous to one who has written the program. And it means sometimes needing to ask the same question more than once to finally reach the answer.

[John Fineberg]

Let me follow up that critical post with something more positive. Tap Forms clearly has the most personal technical support of them all. Thanks, Brendan!

[Brendan]

Hi John,

I’m very sorry for the trouble you’re having with Tap Forms.

Let me try with a simple example. Let’s take the My Movie Library form as an example. It comes built-in to Tap Forms. It has a Genre field and a couple of Saved Searches attached to it which filter the records to show you only those records with a specific Genre. There’s a Pick List associated with the Genre field which gives you a list of frequently used values. For example, Action & Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Science Fiction, etc. That’s what Leo was referring to by the term “selection drop list”.

Because the My Movie Library has a couple of Saved Searches, one for “Genre: Action & Adventure” and “Genre: Comedy”, Tap Forms will display to you a subset of the records from the main My Movie Library form when you click on any of those searches.

Now, if I decided that I wanted to move The Hunger Games movie from the Action & Adventure search results to a new Science Fiction search results, I could first change the Genre field to Science Fiction and then create a new Saved Search with a Search Rule as follows:

Genre contains Science Fiction

After you click Save from the advanced search popover, the search will appear beneath the My Movie Library form.

So now you will see The Hunger Games appear in the “Genre: Science Fiction” search results list and not in the Action & Adventure search results list because you changed its value.

So that’s how you can move a record from one search results list to another.

I think that’s what you’re asking how to do. Is that correct?

Thanks,

Brendan

[John Fineberg]

Sorry, not really. Way too different from my example.

Could you look at my uploaded screen shot again and just tell me what to do from what you see? For clarification, I did change the second of two items called Contacts to Forms, to use your terminology.

In Bento, I would just go to the spreadsheet view and drag an individual record into another folder, or Saved Search List, to use your terminology. Then it would be in two Saved Search Lists, unless I deleted that person from the original list.

[Brendan]

Hi John,

Well, yes, the example was different then your specific use case, but the concepts are the same. You just want to be able to filter your records into smaller lists while maintaining the main list with everything in it. That’s what Saved Searches do.

Tap Forms doesn’t have those kinds of collections that Bento had where you could just drag a record into another list. Tap Forms has what Bento called “Smart Lists” where the records to display are determined based on fields and values that you search in order to filter the list.

[John Fineberg]

Well, it’s now come back to me how I originally managed to create Saved Searches from my Bento Smart Lists. It was all pretty manual and time-consuming. From what I remember, I asked for help in universally pasting search words down an entire column of the spreadsheet view. And, from what I remember, that was not possible at that time. So I had to individually paste search words, one contact at a time, all the way down the long, long, long list. Looks like it was taxing enough that I just put it out of my mind and forgot about it. ;-)

Anyway, now I understand how to move people into and out of Saved Searches. Thanks for jarring my memory.

[Brendan]

Hi John,

Excellent. I’m glad you’ve got that worked out.

As for the copy/paste down the entire spreadsheet view, you can do that more easily now by dragging the yellow dot up or down to copy the value from the first field selected to the other fields in the other records. Just like in Excel or Numbers.

Thanks!

Brendan

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