Exercise 5 - Finding duplicated events

Suppose you have already put together a Composite Chronology. One of the agencies in it sends you an updated version of their chronology with some new events, but they are unable to tell you exactly which ones they are. To save you having to trawl through the two chronologies to identify them, simply import and merge the new version and use the Duplicates tool to highlight or delete the events that you already have.

In this exercise we will highlight duplicates first, then delete them. There is no need to do this though - you can delete them without highlighting them if you want.

Step	Action	What to expect and other comments
1	Read Chronolator Toolbars and About the Exercises if you have not already done so.
2	None of the Sample documents contains any duplicated rows. We shall make some in the first steps of this exercise, which have a light blue background . . .
3	Open SampleInternalChronologyBerrickshireAmbulance.	Note that this chronology has four events from Berrickshire Ambulance Service: two on 18 Feb 2013 and two on 15 Jul 2013.
4	Close SampleInternalChronologyBerrickshireAmbulance.	The only reason to open it was to look at the events.
5	Open SampleCompositeChronologyHealth.	This chronology already contains the two events on 15 Jul 2013 from Berrickshire Ambulance Service.
6	Import SampleInternalChronologyBerrickshireAmbulance, giving it the Source of Information Berrickshire Ambulance Service. Press Merge Tables. Press Sort Tables > Ascending.	For an exercise about Import and Merge, see Exercise 4 - Importing and Merging tables into a Composite Chronology.
		. . . we have now ensured that the Composite Chronology contains duplicated rows from Berrickshire Ambulance Service.
7	Press Tools > Duplicates > Highlight :	The Highlight Duplicate Rows form is displayed:
8	Press OK.	Message 3025 is displayed, saying that two duplicate rows have been found: If not, you might have mis-typed the Source of Information in step 6. Try repeating Steps 7 and 8, having ticked the Ignore source column check box. Refer to Working with Duplicated Rows in Using Chronolator Documents for more details.
9	Press OK.
10	Press the leftmost navigation button on the toolbar:	The document scrolls to the first duplicate, which is highlighted in pale blue: The original event is not highlighted.
11	Press Tools > Duplicates > Delete :	The Delete Duplicate Rows form is displayed: Refer to Working with Duplicated Rows in Using Chronolator Documents if you are interested in the Copy deleted rows check box. It saves the deleted rows in a new document, but is not used in this exercise.
12	Press OK.	The two duplicate rows have been deleted, and Message 3030 is issued to confirm this. Press OK to dismiss it.
13	Close SampleCompositeChronologyHealth without saving changes.

In this exercise, you have seen that:

Chronolator can detect duplicate rows in a document. These can occur if you import an updated version of a chronology into a Composite Chronology, or if you enter the same event more than once, perhaps when resuming work after a holiday
having detected duplicate rows, Chronolator can highlight or delete them for you.