SIMS supports a wide range of flexibility to users to create customized output listings for the main data modules, which allows users to determine which fields they want to see when viewing the output screens.
If you were to go to Classified Documents in SIMS and select Custom Output List from the Command menu (or press Control-G), this would bring up a custom output listing something like this –
The records displayed here can be opened by double-clicking just as with the standard output screens. These screens have features that the standard screens don't share –
You can control which fields are displayed in the columns and in which order they appear.
You can control the labels of the columns.
You can control the width of each column when it first appears.
You can change the column widths as they are displayed by positioning the cursor on the line between column headers, holding down the mouse button, and dragging the line to close or open the column width.
You can sort directly on most fields by just clicking on the column label.
This capability is already in SIMS, but the order of columns, the header labels, and the default column widths can be changed. To customize these screens, go to Utilities and select Output List Customization.
This will bring up the main dialog screen, as shown below:
To begin using this utility, you first pick a file from the file pop up, say Document. When you do, the custom Output screen definition of the Document fields appears, as shown below:
The list of Document fields appears on the scroll at the left and the output list column information is at the right. In the screen above, notice that the first column to appear is Document_Number, which is fairly standard. For any of the selected columns, the user has the option to change:
The header of the column
The width of the column.
These can be changed by highlighting the entry on the scroll at the right and then modifying the values in the entry fields just below the scroll to what is wanted. For example, if you wanted to shorten the column header to Doc # and use a width of only 20 characters, you could delete the words Document Number and type Doc # and then change the 40 to 20. (You can use the up and down arrows to step through the scroll and modify value quickly.)
This screen allows you to define up to 12 columns of information for any data module. Suppose that you want to make Document_Title the first field and make it 25 characters long. To do that, you would highlight the first row on the scroll at the right, then highlight Document_Title on the field list at the left and then click the Add to List button below the field scroll. Alternatively, you could just double-click on the field entries at the left and they would automatically appear in the column definition scroll at the right, set to their defaults for label and width.
You can switch a column that is already on the list. If you wanted to make Barcode the third column, you could just highlight the third line on the column scroll and double-click on Barcode on the field list (you could also highlight Barcode and click the Add to List button).