Use Tools > Duplicates to highlight or delete duplicated rows.

How duplicated rows can occur

Duplicated rows can occur for various reasons. For example:

• you might have broken off completing an Internal Chronology for a while, and inadvertently entered the same records twice
• someone might send you a new version of an Internal Chronology containing a few extra events when you have already merged the original into a Composite Chronology. Rather than having to pick through it all and copy just the new events, you can import the new document in its entirety and let Chronolator identify and delete events that were already there

Sometimes however, duplicates - or near-duplicates - might occur for other reasons. It could be that two different agencies report the same event in exactly the same way. Although this might be unlikely, Chronolator is designed to help you identify and analyse potentially duplicated events however they occur.

Highlight or Delete?

Chronolator can either highlight duplicated rows or delete them. You might want to highlight and review them before deleting them.

If you wish, Chronolator will save deleted duplicates in a separate document.

Ignoring the Source of Information when identifying duplicates

You can instruct Chronolator to ignore the Source of Information column when looking for duplicates. You might want to do this if you have inadvertently imported a Chronolator Document twice using two different Source Prefixes.

Examples

The various options are illustrated below using the following table. Although somewhat implausible, it does provide a useful illustration of the options.

All four rows are identical, except for the Source of Information entry in the second row, which says Portmanor MC instead of Portmanor Medical Centre:

Highlighting duplicates

When you press Tools > Duplicates > Highlight, the Highlight Duplicate Rows form is displayed: It contains a check box labelled Ignore source column.
If you leave the check box blank and press OK, only the last two rows will be highlighted:
In contrast, if you tick the box before pressing OK, the last three rows will be highlighted:
The navigation buttons on the Chronolator toolbar can be used to go from one duplicate row to the next in a long document.

Deleting duplicates

When you press Tools > Duplicates > Delete, the Delete Duplicate Rows form is displayed with an extra option:           If you want to save any rows which are deleted in a new document, tick the Copy Deleted Rows check box.
After you press OK, Chronolator tells you it has deleted some duplicates (3 in this example).
Press Go to list to switch to the new document containing the deleted rows. The description of Message 3031 has some suggestions about how you can use the new document to recover the deleted rows should you wish to do so.