The Bulk Edit views provide powerful and yet relatively easy ways of making modifications to many items (such as lexical entries) at the same time. Here are some of the ways it can be used:

  • Facilitating Ron Moe’s Dictionary Development Process, in which one works as much as possible one field at a time, rather than 1 entry at a time.
  • Doing search and replace operations, such as for orthography changes.
  • Improving the results of a Standard Format import.

Usually, you will apply a filter and deselect any entries which should be excluded from the bulk operation. This way, you have fine control over which items are subject to the bulk operation. The preview function can also help you identify the items you wish to change.
Screenshot of Lexicon Edit view
There are six tabs in Bulk Edit which provide different kinds of bulk editing capability:

  1. List Choice: when the field you need to edit references items in a list, e.g. Grammatical Category, Morpheme type, Semantic Domains, use this tab.
  2. Bulk Copy: use this tab to do a bulk copy from any field to a text field (one you can type in.)
  3. Click Copy: use this tab to do a one-by-one copy-what-I-click from any field to a text field (one you can type in.)
  4. Process: use this tab to run a process (e.g. a python script, encoding converter, consistent changes table) on a text field (one you can type in.)
  5. Bulk Replace: use this tab to do a replace operation in a text field (one you can type in.)
  6. Delete: use this tab to delete content from a text field (one you can type in) or delete an entire item such as an entry).

Example uses:

[vimeo 116266128 w=640 h=448]

List Choice: Filter for all lexeme forms which end in “ment”. Select target field “Grammatical Categories” and change to “noun”. Click “Preview”. Uncheck any for which the change does not apply. Click “Apply”.

[vimeo 116266132 w=640 h=448]

Bulk Copy: Filter for non-blank glosses. “Bulk Copy” glosses to reversals. Preview “Apply”.
[vimeo 116326033 w=640 h=448]

Click Copy: Filter for blank glosses. Click on a word in each definition to have it copied into the gloss field.

Still to improve

  • Bulk Edit is not yet available for Notebook Records nor for Texts
  • Bulk Edit Wordforms does not yet offer many fields for bulk editing, e.g. word glosses and word category should be bulk editable.
  • It would be helpful to have an easier way to insert data in an empty text field through bulk edit. (Can currently be done though goofy workarounds!)