I’m a beginner, just setting up my databases. In the three-pane view, I need to enter text in the “Comment” column for each document. But it seems that I can’t get access to the text field in the “Comment” column unless I’ve just opened the database and created a new document. In the “Name” column, I have no problem opening the text field simply by double-clicking in the appropriate space. But no such luck in the “Comment” column. Can anyone advise? Thanks.
You can open a document’s Info panel, which contains the Comment field, by clicking on the Info icon in the toolbar, or by pressing Shift-Command-I.
Comment: in the early days of document databases the text content was not indexed, and the only way to search for an item was by keyword. I sometimes spent several minutes coming up with appropriate keywords. Nowadays, I’ll add a hundred or more new items every day without bothering to add a single keyword. I do, however, have topical databases, and topical groups within them.
When I use “info” to input a comment, the comments do not appear in the “comment” column. There is only a cartoon balloon added to the item name to show that I’ve inputted a comment.
If the comment doesn’t appear in the comment column, what’s the comment column for?
Text enterred into the Spotlight Comments field in the Info panel can be viewed in a sortable column added to a view, using View > Columns > Spotlight Comment.
Ah, “spotlight column” works. Thanks for the help and the quick response.
But — what’s the “comment” column for? It seems to be useless. Am I missing something? Or is this some kind of vestige that hasn’t yet been removed?
Cheers
hrm
Info on the comment (and other meta data fields) can be found in the manual, or from the app select Help>DT Help and search on ‘comment’. The first hit is Appendix: Meta Data-that’s the info you are looking for.