Hi Mike, Sally and Steve
Many thanks for your postings. I now have the GoTo addin, added and have used it - so thanks for that. I also added the Phenology add-in which looks very interesting. I couldn't find a way of entering a start date and end date for the search, eg to see the pattern of records within one year, to be able to compare with another - is that possible? Currently, it looks as if the graph is based on all records that are held, regardless of year.
Duplicate report 1a is, indeed, much faster, but it identified 12,400+ records out of a database of c 84,000 records! I was thinking that I had not been that careless on importing data, but then a thought struck me. 'Pair' is one of the allowable 'Sex/stage' entries for import. In the early days I found the data supplied by observers was ambiguous (eg someone would make a comment about a pair, but put 2 in the abundance column). To avoid this problem I have asked all observers to enter males and females on separate lines. So, within the parameters of the duplicate report 1a, every time I have an observer who has seen and recorded males and females separately, come up as possible duplicates. I printed the report to see if my old skills with BBC BASIC then MS QuickBASIC would help me to sort out how to add the search for Sex/ stage and then print that. The only thing I did manage to change successfully was the order in which the variables are printed in the final report - a rather trivial change. It is frustrating not having the skills to do more with XML reports. Is there any possibility of adding Sex/stage to the search? It is a mandatory field for importing, so everybody should have an entry in that field...
The duplicate report will be extremely helpful for cleaning up the data held in R6. If it could choose rather fewer records it would be more likely that we users could do the cleaning up.
Again many thanks, Mike, for what you have done.
Cheers, Ian