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Chapter 8: Creating Categories

Categories are used in worksheets to mark points of interest (POIs). The categories indicate for example, why a change is required, to indicate what work you expect to be carried out or that an item has been fixed properly. POIs can have as many categories as you wish.

8.1 Types of Categories

There are five types of default categories

Category
Categorizes by:
Examples
A degree of interest A-Poss - possible interest; and A-Yes definite interest
R reason for being in worksheet R-SF Wizard - this was found by SmartFind Wizard
S reason why special S-DateMsMatchOK - this statement mismatches, but year types confirm it is valid, do not report in consistency check reports
V status during verification V-False Pos - a false identification
X reason for being excluded from consideration X-NameMatch - this was selected by a general name match to identify unlikely POIs

8.2 Customized categories

You can categorize POIs to suit your work practices. All users can allocate categories to worksheet POIs. If you are an administrator, you can create your own project categories in addition to the supplied default ones by using Edit Categories in the Administration menu. You can create new categories and amend or delete existing ones. This enables you to create a group of categories and use these across a project or an organization. For more details look up Category in the Help .

The default categories file is default.fct. Alternatively, if you are an administrator you can specify your own. If you decide to do this and want to avoid unnecessary work later on, we recommend that you carefully plan your categorization strategy.


Note: A category heading can contain a maximum of 15 characters.


8.3 Sharing Categories

When categorizing POIs, it is important in a group project, that the same category definitions are used by all group members for consistency. SmartFind Plus offers the capability of sharing customized category definitions in two ways:

8.4 Reporting on Categories

When you export the worksheet to Microsoft Access to view the reports, you will find by default, the Microsoft Access reports include details of all categories allocated to POIs in the worksheet. However, by using the Category Options button on the SmartFind Plus Reports Access form, you can restrict the categories that appear in the reports.

Whenever you view a report, the list of active categories is shown first, those categories that are excluded from the report are marked with a '*'. You can also obtain a category sub-report independently, if you want to document the categories you are using on your project.

Look up Categories in the Help index for more detailed information.

8.5 Special Points of Interest Indicators

Sometimes it is convenient to mark POIs for special processing within SmartFind Plus. The S category is available for such purposes. For example, when running the year type consistency check, it will report on any mismatch of year types. So if a 4-digit year is moved to a 2-digit year, then it will be flagged as needing examination. On inspection, you might decide that this apparent mismatch is the intended effect, so you no longer want it to appear in the consistency check. You can mark the statement with category S-DateMsmatchOK and specify this category as the one to be ignored for subsequent consistency check reports.


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