Everyday skills

Working in a sheet

Edit records the way you edit a spreadsheet: click, type, and it saves.

Edit in place

Click a cell and type, or pick from its list. It saves as you go; a note at the bottom says All changes saved. If a change can't be saved (say, a required field emptied) the cell turns red and says why.

The dot

The dot beside the number means alive or usable: a living mouse, a vial in use, an open order, a reagent in stock; grey means it isn't. For animals its colour is their age: blue young, green adult, red old (mice: under 8 weeks, 8 to 30, past 30; fish: under 3 months, to 18 months, past 18; a vial or plate: progeny still developing, adults, past its flip or chunk). An expired reagent, antibody or virus is red too. Point at a dot to see what it means.

Scrolling and New

The page scrolls, not the sheet: its search and buttons stay at the top of the window, its column names under them, and its count at the bottom. All under per page lists every row. New, at the bottom left, adds an empty row at the end of the sheet with its first cell ready to type in. A strain, fish, line, plasmid or order needs a name or a tank first, so there it opens the form.

Open a record

The pencil opens the full record in a dialog, with every field, grouped. New records open the same dialog.

Sort, Columns, Export, Print

Sort by any column, or click a heading. Columns hides what you don't need; drag an edge to resize. Export downloads the rows you see as CSV (mice: also Excel and PDF). Print gives a clean sheet. Your sort, filters, hidden columns and widths are remembered on that computer.

On a phone

A sheet becomes one card per row: the number and its buttons on top, then each column by name. Columns still hides what you don't need there.

If a save is refused

Say a tank ID is taken: the page tells you why and reopens the form with what you typed, so you fix one field, not all of them.

Layouts

The layouts sit above the sheet, on the left, the same in every database. Where it fits, a sheet also shows as a Rack grid or Box grid: each tile shows its record's name and position; drag a tile to move it. On a touch screen, press Move, tap a tile, then tap where it goes — another tile swaps with it, Unplaced takes it out. Orders also show as a Board, a column per status: drag a card along.

Suggestions

Text columns suggest what's been typed before, so the lab spells a vendor or a unit one way.

What ended long ago

Mice that died, cages emptied, tubes used up and vials discarded over 90 days ago aren't listed, so a colony with years of history opens quickly. A line at the top says how many; Show them lists everything. Search still finds them, and the mouse export includes them.