InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Maxbear35 on 2021/01/09 16:09

Windows 10

InfoQube Ver 0.9.11 PRE1 12/24/2020

Thanks to the patience of Pierre I have converted from Ecco Pro (23 year user) to InfoQube. He answered all my start up questions.

Here are some 2 newbie questions that I hope you can help me with.

1. Can i set the 'text fore color' to default to something else rather than none. Also can I setup several different fore colors (Red - Grey etc) and the icons for them on my tool bar for one touch (click) activation.

2. Can I have the cursor (highlight) stretch across the entire Item and the colums so I can orient myself when editing a column value. As you know Ecco places a box around the entire row.

I've read the user manual and serched but possibly I'm not looking under the right section because I'm not familiar with InfoQube nomenclature.

Thanks.

Comments

Greetings, fellow Ecc-siteer!

1) You can do this by bringing up the Field Properties dialog (menu -> Tools | Manage Fields...), selecting the ItemForeColor field from the list view and setting the default value via the edit box highlighted in this screenshot.

As for 2), check out Options 1.2.17 ("Highlight focused cell") and 1.2.18 ("Highlicht row headers") in the Options dialog (menu: Tools | Options...). I find that checking 1.2.18 is enough for me and that activating the 1.2.17 option makes the cell text and formatting harder to discern but YMMV. The result is the cyan (the colour can of course be customized) highlight in the screenshot, just make sure the header column (the one to the very left in the screenshot showing a count of the items in the grid that contains the highlight) is not hidden.

Hope this helps!

Phil

Sorry, missed part of the first question. Quick Ecco-style 'text-touchups' for grid items have been requested, but have not been implemented yet. For the doc pane, I believe this can be done by using 'styles' - of which I sadly know nothing. Personally, I use Autohotkey to apply sets of formatting to the grid with a number of keyboard shortcuts that send the individual formatting commands to InfoQube one after the other.

As for my answer on 2), I realize you're probably talking about grids with many columns where the highlight I described above (being at the extreme left of the grid) might not even be visible onscreen, in which case the 'highlight focused cell' option is probably the only possiblity. Oh, and you can apply alternating colour patterns to the rows in your grids as in the second screenshot, which is a great help.

Thank you Phil. Your answers are helping me get things ironed out. I've got things more or less working 100% now.

I use Macro Express to implement Ecco commands that needed several keystrokes and I am implementing them now in InfoQube.

I wonder if you can help out with setting up shortkeys. If I can setup shortkeys to the various commands I can take it from there with Macro Express.

Example would be 'Text Fore Color' I'd love to get a shorkey to that command (which is my first question above)

Can you guide me with that one.I don't seem to be able to locate it in the customize dialog box.

Thanks.

Glad you're finding it helpful!

I just send keystrokes to access the menu bar commands when I want to change foreground colour. I send 'Alt + i' to get to the item menu, then 't' to select text colour, then I send 'cursor right' (only the left and right cursor keys work in this case, if you send cursor up or down, you will instead change the focused item in the grid - not at all what we want!) as many times as necessary to get to the colour I want, then 'enter'. Store this as a macro for, say, blue. Then repeat with a different shortcut key combination for other colours. These can then by combined with other formatting attributes like bold etc.

Cheers

If you select the far left # column, the cursor selection will span all the columns.

Conditional formatting can be used as a substitute for Ecco's text touch-ups.

For example, to apply yellow backcolor and bold formatting to an item with one click:

1) Create new yes/no field BLtY and display it in the grid.

2) Go to Field Properties dialogue>select "item">Conditional Formats

3) Enter conditional formatting formula:

If the BLtY field is checked for an item, it will display with bold font and yellow highlighting.

You can create as many formatting fields as you need, each with a different combination of formats.

Wayne

Thank you for the help. I now have both short-keys and conditional formatting working. Very neat.

I am real happy to have moved to InfoQube.

I guess one could take Wayne's modus operandi even further by making that "BLtY" (='style name') field a text field rather than yes/no. Then one could use an auto-assign rule for the item text field so that if certain tags were entered at the start of (or anywhere inside) the item text, IQ would automatically set the style name field to a certain string. For the strings in that field, there could then be several autoassign rules to turn the abbreviations for styles entered by the user into actual formatting.

Say, if I wanted black and bold style, I could type something like "bkb." at the start of the item text and press enter and IQ would set the formatting, I could further use "reb." for red and bold and "bli." for blue italc etc. Of course, those strings could also be typed directly into the 'style name' column, but for my workflow, the 'tags' in the item text seem more efficient and I guess the column for the style field could then even be hidden from the grid.

Hmm, now if I could only come up with the rule for processing these tags in the item text...