Exercise 4 - Importing and Merging tables into a Composite Chronology

The main reason Chronolator was written was to simplify and accelerate the process of collating chronologies from many sources into a multi-agency Composite Chronology.

Anybody can do this, not just a Chronolator licensee: every Internal Chronology includes a New Composite Chronology button to start the process.

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.	This will be the first document we import into the new Composite Chronology. The first few rows look like this: Notice that the Police have completed the Source of Information column with information about their own records: they have mentioned nothing about being the Police.
3	Press Admin > New Composite Chronology ; When they come to do this on a real case, licensees should use the New Composite Chronology button on the Online Workbench toolbar, as the document will usually be licensed for longer.	Word’s Save As dialog is displayed:
4	Save the new Composite Chronology wherever you like (e.g. in My Documents), giving it a name of your choice. In this exercise, we will use the Chronolator suggestion of Chronolator composite chronology.	SampleInternalChronologyPolice closes, being replaced by Chronolator composite chronology. The toolbar changes to include just Import Tables, Advanced, and Help buttons.
5	Press Import Tables ;	Word’s Open dialog is displayed.
6	Find and open SampleInternalChronologyPolice;	The Source of Information dialog appears:
7	Type Police in the box and press OK; What you type in the box will be added to the beginning of the Source of Information column.	Message 1000 is displayed:
8	Press OK.	The Police document has been imported. Its Source of Information column has been updated: Also, more buttons have been added to the Chronolator toolbar, and the Import Tables button has moved along a bit:
9	Press Import Tables.	Word’s Open dialog is displayed.
10	Find and open SampleInternalChronologySocialCare.	The Source of Information dialog appears.
11	Type Social Care in the box and press OK.	The Social Care table is copied to the bottom of the document, and its Source of Information column has been updated. The table is simply added to the Composite Chronology as a new table; it is not merged with what is already there.
12	Press Import Tables.	Word’s Open dialog is displayed.
13	Find and open SampleCompositeChronologyHealth.	The Source of Information dialog appears.
14	Type Health in the box and press OK.	The Health table is copied to the bottom of the document, and its Source of Information column has been updated.
15	Review the contents of the Composite Chronology.	There are three separate tables. Import Tables does just that and nothing else. Each table has different column widths and date formats. Merging these by hand into a single table with events consistently formatted and in the right order would take some time.
16	Save Chronolator composite chronology using standard Word Save.	It is always good practice to save your work from time to time so that you can pick up where you left off if something goes wrong.
17	Press Merge Tables.	Message 1100 is displayed.
18	Press OK.	The tables have been merged into a single table with uniform column widths. Dates and times are still in the same format as in the original documents. Events are still in the same order they were imported - Police, Social Care, Health. Merge Tables does just that and nothing else.
19	Press Format Dates and choose an option from the list that drops down:	The dates are put into the format you chose. Times are put into a 24-hour clock format (e.g. 23:10).
20	Press Sort Tables > Ascending:	The events are put in date and time order. On any one day, events with blank times are put before those whose time is specified
21	Press Check Tables:	No errors are found. Having imported, merged, and sorted three error‑free documents, there is no reason to expect any - but it is always sensible to check.
22	Close Chronolator composite chronology, saving changes or not as you wish.

In this exercise, you have learned that:

assembling a Composite Chronology involves Importing, Merging, Formatting, and Sorting tables. Note that the exercise did NOT illustrate that if you have many chronologies to merge, it is up to you whether you import them all first and then do the other tasks, or do each one as you go, or some other combination
Chronolator will format all dates and times for you consistently
Chronolator will put events into the correct order

Sometimes, when the times of some events are known while those of others are not, you might want to force events into a certain order. Exercise 7 - Forcing events into order illustrates how to do that.