Notepad

This facility allows the user to create notes linked to specific datasheets. These notes are shared between the user's subscriber group.

Creating a User Note

To create a user note, click on Add note on the datasheet's menu, or click the Notepad link of the main menu bar followed by Add Note. A free text box then appears in which the notes, results or comments can be written and saved using the Save Note button. 

Viewing, Editing, Saving and Deleting Notes

All notes that have been created can be viewed and edited from the Menu bar by clicking on the Notepad link or from selecting the note from an individual datasheet.

When saving a note, the system checks to ensure that no modifications have been made to the same note by another member of the user's subscriber group. If someone else has edited and saved the note in the time that another was editing, the initial user is notified of the situation and asked to make a decision as to whether to cancel their changes and accept the ones already made, or to overwrite the stored changes with their changes. The user also has the option to rewrite their note to incorporate the changes made by the second user. This concatenated note may then be saved to the database.

To delete a Note, click on the Notepad option and then the icon displayed to the left of the selected note.

Softlinking

Any text displayed whilst viewing a note is immediately active and can be softlinked. You can select any word or multi-word term in your User note, and then click the softlink button to display a different datasheet, reference or a glossary definition. From the displayed window other options may be chosen. For example, highlighting the word shrimp and clicking the softlink button will find all the glossary entries that contain the term shrimp and all the datasheets that have names containing the word shrimp. From the softlink results page you can navigate to a glossary definition of a datasheet.

Subheadings

If you wish to give your notes subheadings, you may do so by wrapping the text in HTML heading tags. An example of this is: <H1>My Title</H1>. To work your way down the levels of subheadings, simply increase the heading number, i.e. H2, H3, H4 and so on.

Inserting File Names and Internet Addresses

The notepad facility saves text as straight HTML. Therefore to link to filenames, web addresses, pictures etc, the correct HTML tags must be used. Filenames of documents can be inserted in the User Note, but the appropriate application must be installed on the user's machine in order to run the file. e.g. if trying to link to a ".doc" file, Microsoft Word must be installed.
  
Examples of how to insert the following are listed below:
 
To Insert Format Example
An Internet Address <a href="http://web address goes here">title to display</a> <a href="http://www.cabi.org">CAB International Website</a>
  
A filename <a href="file://file name goes here">title to display</a> <a href="file://c:\mytext.doc">My Text Word Document</a>
  
A picture or photograph <img src="picture location"> <img src="c:\myphoto.jpg">

Formatting Text

Notepad text may be formatted using the same method of applying HTML tags to selected words. Below are examples on how to do this:
  
To make text Format
Bold <b>text to make bold goes here</b>
  
Italic <i>text to make italic goes here</i>
  
Underlined <u>text to underline goes here</u>

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