Hi Paul,
Is there a way to do a secondary sort of the references list, such as first by author and secondarily by date? I can't find anything in the manual about a way to do this, and none of the common methods for doing this (e.g. as in file managers or e-mail programs) work.
If Biblioscape is not capable of this at present, can the feature be added sometime soon in a patch? A common way to do this is to do a Ctrl-Click in the header of a field to make it the secondary field.
You can sort references by
You can sort references by up to 3 levels after clicking the menu command "View | Sort".
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Thanks, Paul. Glad to see there is a way to do this.
A slick and convenient way of doing this, that you may want to keep in mind for a future version of Biblioscape, is the way sorting can be accomplished in DOpus (Directory Opus, http://www.gpsoft.com.au/). The method allows very fast on-the-fly changes to the sorting, as well as reverting to the user's usual sort.
1. As with Biblioscape, clicking on a field header makes it the sorted field, and successive clicks on the header toggle reversals of the sort.
2. A Ctrl-Click on another field makes it the secondary sort, and successive Ctrl-Clicks on that field toggle reversals of that secondary sort.
3. A tertiary sort is selected in the same manner.
The advantages, as opposed to the View|Sort menu is that any changes to the sort can be very quickly done, modified or undone. The user will therefore be inclined to change the sort more often than otherwise, instead of visually picking through an as-is list, and this improves both the utility and convenience of the program.
(P.S., I highly recommend DOpus as a Windows Explorer replacement -- I have been using it for years, and can't live without it.)
The References module behave
The References module behave differently for sorting operatins. Other modules can do what you want. Instead of holding the Ctrl key, please hold down the Shift key. Because there could be thousands of references under a folder, a different sorting mechanism is used to conserve memory. We may consider to change this in the next major upgrade since modern machines have enough RAM.