Submitted by jimspoon on 2024/12/27 20:07

Running 127Pre1.  I'm needing to learn a chapter of a government code, a naturally hierarchical type of document, which makes it an ideal candidate to convert to a collapsible outline.  I hoped to do this with IQ, but I'm having problems - perhaps it's just too big a document to do this with IQ.

Anyway, so you can see what's happening, here's the document:

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/docs/GV/htm/GV.552.htm

I created a new SNDB file to hold the outline I intended to create.  I created a yes/no field and grid named "Texas Public Information Act".  In that grid, I did a "Paste as Plain Text".  I got the notification that (around) 4738 items would be created, and I clicked OK to proceed.  The status bar indicated that 1992 items would be created - that might be a red flag because the paste dialog said that 4737 items would be created.  But moving on, it looked like these items were created.

My next step was to make each Subchapter heading (Subchapter A through Subchapter J) a top level item.  All the items between the Subchapter A heading and the Subchapter B heading would become subitems of Subchapter A, and so on.  I highlighted all these Subchapter A items, and pressed Alt-Right to make them subitems of the Subchapter A TLI.  The items were apparently indented, and the "Subchapter A" TLI was collapsed.  When I expanded the Subchapter A TLI, the items that had been directly under the Subchapter A heading item were not there. I expected that the items would be indented, and the same order maintained between them, but somehow the newly created subitems were all in the wrong order.

Any ideas?  I think I'll add a numeric "order" field/column to see this can help me accomplish my goal.

I thought I'd try Ecco to see if it can do the job, but when I tried to install it, I got the message "This app can't run on your PC" !!  

 

Comments

Update.  I added a numeric Order column, highlighted all the cells in the Order column (any easy way to do that?) and then did Edit > Renumber Items to put a number for each item in the Order column, according to the order of the items in the original document.  Then once again I did Alt+Right to indent all the "Subchapter A" items.  After doing so I discovered that the indented items were placed in reverse order 221 to 8 (Order column value), instead of the proper order, 8 to 221.  Not sure what I need to do to prevent IQ from reversing items order when I indent them.  I checked Grid > Sort, and it is set to "None (manual)" and "Sort Items" (not items and subitems).

Hi Jim,

Large document indeed. I pasted it in the Doc pane first and then copied it and pasted in the grid (as HTML). I got all lines but no indenting. 

  1. Select all column values: right-click on the header and do Select Column
  2. Reversed order, humm, I'll try to reproduce this but when I did it, order was fine. You can right-click on the parent item Order column and do Sort Sub-items ascending

Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer

Thanks for your help Pierre.  I did it your way:

(1) paste all the text into HTML pane.

(2) copy all the text in the HTML pane.

(3) paste as HTML in the grid. (there is still a discrepancy between the number of items that IQ says will be created and the number that is actually created.)

(4) created an Order field, added Order column to grid.  

(5) right-clicked Order column header > Select Column.

(6) Edit > Renumber Items to number all the items in the Order column.

(7) select all the "Subchapter A" items and Alt+Right to indent them, making them subitems of the "Subchapter A" header.

Like you said, the order of the new subitems was maintained when indented, they were not reversed, and, this time (unlike before) the "Subchapter A" header parent item was not automatically collapsed.  So this is a much better result.

Differences between the method I used (which reversed the indented items) and your method:

(1) I pasted the text directly into the grid, while you pasted it into the HTML pane first, copied it from the HTML pane, and then pasted it to the grid.

(2) in my method, I pasted it into the grid as Plain Text, while you pasted it as HTML.

Seems like it was probably (1) or (2) which caused the better result, but I haven't tested which. 

By the way, I don't know if you already have such a feature, but in the case of documents like this which already have outline numbering, but not necessarily the corresponding text indentation levels - it would be amazing if IQ could recognize the outline numbers and create an IQ outline where the items are all indented to the proper level according to the labeling scheme in the original document. (I guess I could use a text editor to do advanced search/replace to insert the correct tab indentations into the original text and then do a "tab indented" import into IQ.)

UPDATE again: even though I used your method - when I did an Alt-Right to indent the Subchapter C items, they were placed in reverse order.  Perhaps it was the number of items that caused the problem - it seems to happen when I indent more than a certain number of items, not sure what number of items triggers the problem.  I just noticed that the reversal did not happen when I indented only 38 or 51 items.  Fortunately, I discovered that I was able to highlight the Order column cells for the reversed items, right-clicked the selected cells, and then clicked "Sort selected by Order Asc" which put the reversed items into their proper order.

P.S. If I bring up the Find and Filter dialog, and search for the Subchapter headers, e.g. "Subchapter F", then click the Find/Filter button - Auto-Search gets turned on.  I have to press Ctrl+F3 to clear that before I can continue.  Does a "Find/Filter" operation turn on Auto-Search?

  1. re order: Is it possible you selected from the bottom > up ? That does invert the order (perhaps it should not though)
  2. Find-Filter: What Find Action did you select (item 2-)? Find Next does a grid Auto-Search...
How do I ?