Changing Tag Field Labels

[Doug Terrell 0]

What are the steps to changing the default place names for a particular Tag?

 

 

What I wish to do is change the place field names within the various Military Service Tags I have created to align with the data I intend to place there. For example, I wish to change the Addressee field name to "Rank", the Detail field name to "Company", the City to "Regiment" and so on.

 

 

If possible, I would like to have the above changes become the defaults for that Tag Entry Screen.

 

 

Thanks!

 

 

Doug Terrell

[John Cardinal 0]

Doug,

 

Place Labels are controlled by Place Styles.

 

Ranks, etc., aren't places. I wouldn't store them there.

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

Doug, I'm inclined to agree with John that using place fields for this purpose may not be the best idea in the long run. Will the information be for stages in the military careers of specific individuals, and how do you visualize reporting the data - in a narrative or tabular form? Might split memos work for your purposes?

 

Virginia

[RobinL 0]

I would advise using a split memo on appropriate custom tag(s) with suitable senences.

 

You can still filter on and report on individual memo parts, so that you can find all persons of a rank or from a regiment, etc. This does not confuse places with non-place hierarchies. If you were using v7 then you could use the reminder feature to assist in more consistent data entry. Take a look at the sentence section on this forum to get some ideas.

[Doug Terrell 0]

First, thanks to all of you for the responses.

 

John-Appreciate the tip on making the changes in the Place Styles. Have been experimenting with several different options.

 

Virginia-Understand your concern (and John’s) about storing the ranks here. The military service tags I created (one for each conflict) are, for the most part, a “storage site” for the military information I have gathered-it is not included in any of my narrative reports. It has worked well so far, especially as it relates to sorting and printing reports in tabular form which I use in my research. Keeping the ranks here just seemed to make sense.

 

Robin-Thanks for the tip on split memos. I did not know you could search/filter these, so I’ll need to explore the possibilities.

 

Again, thanks to all. I always receive great advice on this forum.

 

Doug

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

Doug -

 

I use tabular reports almost exclusively and started out in TMG using otherwise-unused place fields for non-place info - like census information and tag-edit-dates. It does make a hodge-podge of the Master Place List and I was never sure when such a departure from the program design would come back to bite me - so I've switched to split memos. They offer the same benefits for tabular reports and, once set up, are pretty easy to use. You might give that concept a look

 

Virginia