Bruji

I have just bought the three bundle for what seems a nice set of programs.

One reason I went for these rather than any other programs is the existence of these forums.

I have successfully, and easily, imported my previous books database, which was a personally designed one in AppleWorks.

I expect I will have a bunch of questions - I always prefer a manual to Help pages.

My own database has much less detailed information than Bookpedia can get. It might be nice to fill in extra fields on my existing entries. I could sort of see that this can be done, but I am not entirely clear as to the procedure.

If I want to search on several criteria simultaneously (for instance, all books whose author name contains Aik and who subject contains Fantasy) is the best way to do it to create a new smart collection with these criteria and then to delete the collection at the end of the search?

That is the perfect approach. Smart collection are useful as just temporary collections for this kind of sorting. In this case it's the way to go because the subjects can have many subjects and Fantasy might not be the very first one. But depending on the criteria you can do it by sorting the collection and using the search field at the top. Displaying the subjects column and typing "Aik" and "Fantasy" in the filter search (top right) would have given you a close list to the smart collection (the difference is there might have been matches with Aik and Fantasy in some of the other columns shown, but they should be easy to spot).

By clicking on the magnyfing glass in the search field you can limit the search to a particular field, but you would not have been able to do both author and subject at once. So you have to do one search then select all and use "Collection with selection" and then perform the second search on the new collection. So as you can see there several ways to go about it, go with what feels natural and gives you the best workflow.

Bookpedia will also sub-sort 6 column deep. So clicking on genre and then author you can select all the books by one author that are fantasy as they would be grouped together. If your criteria involves "is" or "starts with" exploit the fact that these entries will also sort together to bunch them up, if the criteria is "contains" then the search field and smart collection are the answer.