Generating Headings

Command:

Edit -> Headings -> Generate Headings...

There are many situations where samples have to be renamed or existing names have to be extended by a serial number. While this could be achieved by manually editing the row headings for a small number of objects, the editing of thousands of labels forbids itself. Thus DataLab offers a generator for automatically generating or extending row or column headings.

The principle of generating headings is quite simple: there are three fields - the left, the center, and the right string - which are concatenated to a new heading. The new heading may be either inserted before, or appended to any existing heading, or may replace the current heading. While the left and the right strings are kept unchanged for all generated headings, the center string can be either an incremental decimal serial number, or an incremental date/time stamp. The first number (or date/time) and the interval between succeeding labels can be set by the user.

The serial number uses leading zeroes displaying a user-defined number of digits. The serial number wraps around if the number exceeds the maximum number determined by the númber of digits (i.e. the succeeding number of 999 is 000 if the number of digits is 3). The format of the date/time stamp is controlled by a simple formatting string. Several of often used formats can be selected from the drop-down box.

When calling the command Edit/Headings/Generate Headings... DataLab displays the following window:

In order to generate the headings you have to click the execute button (). Changes can be reverted by pressing the undo button (). This resets all row and columns headings to the state they had when activating the headings generator.