Column descriptions let you provide additional information about the contents of a column. For example, in the image below the descriptions are used to store the measurement date (the column headers are half blue because the columns have been set to read only.
You can copy column descriptions to the clipboard so that they can be pasted into another spreadsheet, text window or external program. This can be useful when you have a series of trials and want them to all have the same column names and descriptions (you can copy the column names as well).
If you pre-select columns, just the selected columns descriptions are copied to the clipboard. The column descriptions are copied as a comma delimited list where each description is quoted with single quote marks (e.g. ‘kg/ha’,’%’,’2004-5′). The list of column descriptions is comma delimited, and so are in a useful format for pasting into Genstat commands.
If pasting into a spreadsheet where there are fewer columns than the source spreadsheet Genstat will not warn you: for example, if there are 8 columns in your source spreadsheet but only 7 in the target spreadsheet, Genstat will paste the first 7 column descriptions and drop the last one.
- With your source spreadsheet displayed, from the menu select Spread | Column | Descriptions | Copy.
- Click your target spreadsheet, text window or external program to make it active, then from the menu select Spread | Column | Descriptions | Paste.