Exercise 7 - Forcing events into order

Sometimes you might not know at what time events happened on a particular day, but you do know their order. Chronolator’s Sequence column lets you specify that order.

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 SampleCompositeChronologyHealth.
3	Look at the events of July 15 2013. They are obviously in the wrong order - for example, in the first one the baby has collapsed, while in the second one, the baby was well.
4	Press Tools > Sequencing > Add Column:	A column headed Seq is added to the left of the table. It contains reference numbers, starting at 1 and increasing by 1: An Administrator can define a Sequencing column when setting up the document, or - as in this exercise - it can be added later.
5	Scroll down to the first two events of March 15: references 16 and 17.
6	Type the correct sequence numbers in the Seq column:
7	Press Sort Tables > Ascending:	The events are put into the correct order:
You do not always have to update sequence numbers in all the events, as Sort Tables recognises decimal numbers. For example, suppose that you now wanted to put event 19 between events 16 and 17 (this does not make sense in terms of the story, but we will do it here just to illustrate the feature).
8	Replace the 19 in the event with a number between 16 and 17 – 16.5 say:
9	Press Sort Tables > Ascending:	The events are put into the requested order:
10	The decimal reference number is probably not what you want. Now that events are in the right order, you can update the numbers. Press Tools > Sequencing > Update - sequential:	The Seq column is updated with whole numbers:
11	Close SampleCompositeChronologyHealth without saving changes.

In this exercise, you have seen that:

you can use a Sequence column to force events into the right order when Chronolator has insufficient information about when they happened
you can add a Sequence column to a table which does not have one. This is the only change that Chronolator allows you to make to the column headings defined by the Case Review Administrator