We’ve had a few days of gentle rain, slowly soaking our rocky Ozark soil to the brim. Water rushes merrily in all the little wet weather streams that chuckle downhill in frothy exuberance. A golden sun blazed forth this morning among billowing clouds and the muted colors of the past few days were transformed into vibrant greens glittering with sparkling jewels of dew.
Everything is growing by leaps and bounds now. The wooly sage colored leaves and tiny purple flowers of henbit push brazenly toward the sun while vivid purple violets bow modestly amid their leafy rosettes. I cringe at mowing such lovely plants, but something must be done to keep them in check lest they take over the entire lawn and push out their more timid cousins.
Since this is the final week of Spring Cleaning, I thought a quick lesson on “weeding” out your old Codes would be in order. Codes, especially Category Codes, can certainly grow like weeds in your database obscuring the codes you use frequently and making it time consuming to create reports.
This is not to say you should limit the number of codes you create. Codes are essential in getting coherent and precise reports. I am also not suggesting you DELETE Codes. Deleting Codes deletes them from the records they have been assigned to, making your database less robust. So what about those old Codes you just don’t want to deal with anymore?
The solution to this is to make the codes inactive. You can do this by going to WINDOWS>CODES and selecting the type of code you want to weed. You will notice a checkbox in the very first column which is called ACTIVE. Unchecking this box hides the Code both in this Codes Maintenance Window and in all the dropdowns. Should you need to see an inactive Code while creating a Report or Grouping, simply check the “Include Inactive Codes” on the Code selection tabs. Weeding your Codes will make your database much easier to use and the best part is you won’t get your hands dirty at all!
Good luck on this task and please call FundRaiser Tech Support at 800-543-4131 if you’d like assistance.
Sherry Willis is one of the fine Tech Support team at FundRaiser. She has many interests besides computers and has recently volunteered her time to train horses for the Whetstone Boys Ranch.