Exercise 1 - Entering, formatting, and sorting events in an Internal Chronology

Chronolator has a number of features to help you quickly transcribe events from other sources and produce a high quality chronology which meets the requirements of the Case Review Administrator.

Step	Action	What to expect and other comments
1	Read Chronolator Toolbars and About the Exercises if you have not already done so.
2	Open SampleInternalChronologyPolice.
3	Click in the bottom right hand cell of the table.
4	Press the Tab key on the left of your keyboard:	A new row is added to the table. You can add events to the bottom of the table as new records come to hand. There is no need to hunt around in the table looking for where they should go - you can use Chronolator to put them in the right order.
5	Type 16feb13 in the Date Column. Type 1pm in the Time column. Type My first new event in the Comments column.	The dates and times are exactly as you might have found them in some paper records. Being able to do this lessens the possibility of errors in transcription.
6	Press the Tab key to add a new row to the table.
7	Type 22/5/12 in the Date Column. Type 2.30 in the Time column. Type Another new event in the Communication - within agency column.	The bottom two rows should now look like this:
8	Press Format Dates and press the first option from the list that drops down:	The dates and times are put into the specified format: Format Dates formats times as well.
9	Press Sort Tables and press Ascending:	The events that you added are put in the right places in the table:
10	Close SampleInternalChronologyPolice without saving changes.	Chronolator checks the document for errors. When the check completes, Message 3005 is displayed, asking you to correct the errors before returning the document. Internal Chronologies are checked every time they are closed, helping to ensure that administrators receive error-free documents. One of the checks that Chronolator makes is that certain columns must always be completed. This exercise deliberately did not ask you to type anything in the mandatory Source of Information column so you could see what happens when you close a document containing errors.
11	Press OK as if you want to correct the errors later.	The document closes. You would press Cancel if you wanted to keep the document open and correct the errors.

In this exercise, you have learnt that:

you can add new events at the bottom of the chronology table and let Chronolator put them in order
you can enter dates and times exactly as written on the source records and let Chronolator put them in a consistent format
Chronolator checks an Internal Chronology for errors every time it is closed.
Exercise 2 - Error Checking has more information about the sort of errors Chronolator detects, how you can find out more about them, and how you can check for them whenever you want.