After you have entered at least one sighting, you can fix the elements of sighting records so they are automatically repeated in subsequent sightings. By fixing one or more elements, you are essentially establishing a "trip," where multiple birds are seen on the same date and at the same Place.
In the “Fix” panel on the main screen, click the Date, Place and Comm buttons. You have just “fixed” the Date, Place and Comments for a trip. Notice that those buttons are now lighted, as a reminder that they are “fixed.”
Pick a species from the Master Checklist and select it. Bang! The whole sighting is done. You just click OK to confirm it. Continue down through the list, selecting the species you saw. That's how you record a trip or outing—all on one date, at one Place, usually with no comments. To change the Place at any time, click Place again, select a new Place with the next sighting, and click Place to “fix” it again. You can do the same with the date. You can also change the fixed date or Place in the record confirmation dialog, as you will see below.
You can have any combination of “fixes” on at any time, and toggle them on and off at will. In the next section, you will see that you have even more flexibility when fixing the comment. AviSys is not a “trip oriented” program where you must first define a “trip” (Place and date) before you start entering sighting data. In AviSys, a “trip” is a Place and a date or range of dates -- or a date or range of dates, with multiple Places -- regardless of when you actually entered the sighting data into the program.
However, you can easily keep a trip log. See Chapter 2, Power and Strategy - Creating a Trip Log in the User's Guide for a way to maintain a complete log of all your birding trips.
If you edit a "Fixed" record at the Record Confirmation dialog, for each of the elements you edit you are asked if you want the edit to also apply to the existing “Fix.”
For instance, suppose you had been recording sightings for Nisqually NWR, and had the Place fixed, and then entered a record you had actually seen at St. Martin's College. At the record confirmation, you would change the record's Place to St. Martin's. If this record represents the start of a new string of records, now at St. Martin's because you had changed birding locations, you would answer "Yes" to the prompt to change the "fixed" Place to St. Martins. Otherwise, this would just be a stray record, and you could continue entering records for Nisqually.
The comment is one of the elements you can “fix,” and you can arrange that just a part of the comment will be automatically repeated from record to record if the comment is “fixed."
A semicolon “;” is used to separate the repeated part of a comment from the variable part. For example, if for the first sighting record of an outing you include the comment...
/MR at Saint Elmo's Lake; these were all immatures /i/p
and you then “fix” the comments, on the subsequent sighting records you will be presented the following comment to accept, edit or add to:
/MR at Saint Elmo's Lake;
Note that the only portion of the comment retained is the portion before the semicolon. The cursor is placed at the end of the comment. Tap the End key if you want to append additional comments just for this record. If there is no semicolon in a comment, the entire comment is repeated and you are not prompted with a comment entry window for subsequent sightings after it's fixed.
You will notice that in the prior example the Key Word “St. Elmo's Lake” will be automatically repeated from record to record as you enter sighting records from an outing. That's exactly how a Key Word is effectively used to assign the location of sightings when a Site is not used from the Places Tables. The Place used for these records was probably the state “Nebraska.”