This article is part (6) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

To edit a book, you first have to find the book that you want to edit. Once you’ve found it, you should be looking at a window full of details for the book, as shown below.

Browse Stephen King Books (click to enlarge)

In this case, we’ve selected the book “Black House” from the list on the left and can see all of the details for it on the right side, like the “Title” (1), the “Main Author” and so on. Whereas the title is just text, the author, publisher, section and other values are selected from their respective drop-down lists (2). If you’ve made changes, the “Save” button (3) will be enabled and you can press it to save your changes. Use the “Revert” button (4) to throw away any changes you’ve made or the “Delete” button (5) to remove the book from the database. You can learn more about the other buttons in How to browse your books.

If there is a button with a little downward-pointing arrow next to an item (e.g. publishers and sections), the available entries are filled in as you type; if there is a button with three small dots next to an item, a search window is shown if there are multiple matches for the typed text. In both cases, if you type an entry that doesn’t exist yet, the Book Library offers to create it for you.

As an example, let’s see what happens when you type a new author name, as shown below:

Type Author 'Green' (click to enlarge)

Here we’ve typed the author name “Green” instead of “King”; press tab or enter to continue and show the window below:

Searching for Author 'Green' (click to enlarge)

Since there are already four authors with the last name “Green” in the database, you are shown a search window and asked to select one of them. The text you typed is shown in the search arguments on the left (1) and the matching authors are shown on the right (2). Choose one and press “Open selected” (3) to continue; the book’s author is changed to the one you selected.

Unlike authors, lists of available publishers, sections and so on are accessible via a drop-down list, as shown below:

Change Publisher (click to enlarge)

In the example above, we’ve pressed the “drop down” button (1) to show a list of available publishers. The currently selected publisher—”Random House”—is shown and you can select another publisher from the list (2) to choose that one instead.

Alternatively, you can just start typing the name of a publisher; as you type, the Book Library will fill in the best match for the letters that you’ve typed so far, as shown below:

Type 'Gr' for the Publisher (click to enlarge)

Here, we’ve typed “Gr” and gotten “Grafton Books” (1) as the best match; if that’s the publisher you were looking for, then you can press tab to accept the suggestion and continue. If it’s not, just keep typing the publisher until there are no more matches in the database, as shown below:

Type 'Green' for the Publisher (click to enlarge)

Now, we’ve typed “Green” (1) and the Book Library has no suggestions to make; when you press tab, the Book Library will offer to add the entry you typed as a new publisher, as shown below:

Add new Publisher (click to enlarge)

The text you typed for the publisher is used as a suggestion, but you can add more text (1), then press “Ok” (2) to add the new publisher and continue.

When you’re finished with all of your changes, make sure to press “Save” in the toolbar (or type Ctrl+S) to save your changes.

This article is part (5) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

When you’re adding books, you might find that you’re always filling out certain fields—like “Location” or “Owner”—with the same information. The Book Library can fill out these values automatically when you create a new book if you set up a default template.

When you start the Book Library, you’re taken to the main menu, as shown below:

Choose Add from the Main Menu (click to enlarge)

Just as when adding a book, select “Add Books” (1) from the menu. You’ll be shown the explorer window, set up to add a new book. After filling in the desired default values, you should have something like the window below:

Values for Saving a Template (click to enlarge)

In this window, we’ve filled in the values we want to save with the template (2), like the “Location”, “Owner” and so on. We’ve also typed a name for our template next to “Templates” (1); press the “Save Template” button (3) to show the window below:

Choosing a Save Location (click to enlarge)

Pressing the little arrow for “Template available for” (1) shows the list of values; choose “This user on this machine”.

Settings for Saving a Template (click to enlarge)

To make the template you selected the default one—that is, used for new books—check the box next to “Use as default template” (1). Press “OK” (2) to save your changes and close the window.

Now, if you press the “New” button in the toolbar on the explorer window (or type “Ctrl+N”), a new book has the values from your template pre-filled, so that you don’t have to fill them in yourself anymore, as shown below:

A New Book Using the Default Template (click to enlarge)

Your template is selected (1) and the values (2) are pre-filled, as expected. There are also some buttons (3) for applying, saving and deleting the selected template (“Cruina’s Books” in the example).

Continue on to (6) How to edit a Book.

This article is part (4) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

When you start the Book Library, you’re taken to the main menu, as shown below:

Choose Add from the Main Menu (click to enlarge)

From here, choose “Add books” to show the window below:

Adding a Book (click to enlarge)

This window is opened to a new book where you can start filling in the information for it (1). Fields in pink are required; those in grey are optional.

Setting the Author (click to enlarge)

Once you’ve filled in the title, it’s copied to the list on the left side (1). Fill in the name of the author (2) and press tab or enter to continue. Since the author we chose in this example isn’t in the database, the Book Library offers to create a new one with the window below:

Creating a new Author (click to enlarge)

Since we typed the author as “Last name, first name”, the Book Library automatically extracted the first name (1) and last name (2) to suggest the author name to create. You can, of course, change it; when you’re finished, press “OK” (3) to continue. You’ll be returned to the book window, as shown below:

Choosing a Publisher (click to enlarge)

Since the title and author are now filled in, they are colored grey; above, we have typed “Pre” for the publisher and the Book Library has found “Prentice Hall” (1) as the best match for it. For more information about making similar changes, see How to Edit a Book. After you’ve filled in all the information for your book and saved it (using the “Save” button in the toolbar or by typing Ctrl+S), it should look like the window below:

The Final Book, Saved (click to enlarge)

After you’ve added a few books, you might notice that you always fill out certain fields with the same information. You can tell the Book Library to pre-fill this information by (5) adding a Default Template.

Continue on to (5) How to Add a Default Template.

This article is part (3) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

When you start the Book Library, you’re taken to the main menu, as shown below:

Choose Print from the Main Menu (click to enlarge)

In the toolbar, there’s a “Print” button (1); press that (or type Ctrl+P) to show the print window below:

Main Book List Settings (click to enlarge)

The list on the left shows the available reports; the one you’ll use most is the “Main Book List” (1); select that to show the options for that report. You can elect to restrict by “Location” and/or “Owner” (2) or just leave one or both blank to include all books. To just print out the report, press the “Execute” button (4); to see what the report will look like before printing, press “Preview” (3) to see the window below:

Preview of the Book List (click to enlarge)

From here, you can move forward and back through the pages and press the “Print” button (1) to print it out.

Continue on to (4) How to Add a Book.

This article is part (2) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

Browsing your books will always start with a search, as demonstrated in the searching for books tutorial. So, let’s start from there:

Stephen King's Books (click to enlarge)

An explorer window shows the contents of a list of books (1); selecting a book on the left shows the details for that book on the right, where you can change them, if you like.

However, if you select the “Books” itself, you’ll see another list on the right, showing more information:

Browse a List of Books (click to enlarge)

As you can see, the explorer is showing the list of “Books” (1) and the books are grouped by “section” (2). You can change how the books are grouped using the “Group by” drop-down list. The books are grouped by their section; press the “+” next to a group to expand it (3), as we’ve done for the “Horror” section in the example above. You can also print or show a print preview for a list using the buttons in the toolbar (4). See How to Print a List of Books for more information on printing.

Each book in the list on the left has a small “+”-sign next to it. Click this button to show information associated with that book, as shown below:

Browsing your Data (click to enlarge)

Above, we’ve expanded information for the book “Black House” and also expanded information for that book’s publisher, “Random House” (2) and section “Fantasy” (3); under each of these entries, we’ve also expanded the list of books for the publisher and section, respectively. Since we’ve selected the publisher in the list on the left, we see details for the publisher on the right, including the number of books (1).

With a few simple clicks of the mouse, you have a wealth of information about your book library available. You can, of course, select any of these lists of books and press the “Print” button in the toolbar (or type Ctrl+P) to print that list.

At any point, you can select the “Search” button (4) from the toolbar (or type Ctrl+O) to search for a new list of books.

Continue on to (3) How to Print a List of Books.

This article is part (1) of a multi-part Book Library tutorial.

When you start the Book Library, you’re taken to the main menu, shown below:

Choose Search from the Main Menu (click to enlarge)

Select “Search for Book” (1) from the list to bring up the book search window, shown below:

The Search Window (click to enlarge)

On the left side of the window are fields by which you can search; fill in the values you’re looking for, then press “Search” or hit enter to continue. For this tutorial, type “king” in the “Main Author” field (1), then press the “Search” button (2) (or press tab or enter on the keyboard). If there is only one author whose last name starts with “king”, that author is automatically selected; if there is more than one, the following window is shown:

Choosing an author (click to enlarge)

Choose the author for whom you’d like to find books—in this case, you should choose “King, Stephen” (2)—and press “Open selected” (2) to continue. Press “Search” on the original search window and you’ll see the results below:

Search Results in the Search Window (click to enlarge)

Here you can see the value by which you searched—Stephen King (1)—and you can press the button with an ellipsis on it ([…]) to choose a different author or just type a different name. The current matches for your searches are listed on the right (2); you can see above the list that 25 books were found and that there are “more available”. You can press the “More results” button (3) to load more matches in that case. Once you’ve found the book or books for which you’re searching, select them in the list on the right and press the “Open selected” button (4). The books appear in the explorer window, as shown below:

Selected Books in the Explorer (click to enlarge)

The list on the left (1) shows the books you selected in the search window and the area on the right shows details for the selected book (“Black House” in this case). You can change any of these details, then press “save” in the toolbar or press Ctrl+S on the keyboard. See How to Edit a Book for more information on changing a book.

Continue on to (2) How to Browse your Books.

The Book Library is a personal library manager that lets you organize the books in your library by section, publisher and author. You can keep track of lots of information about each book, including the price, condition and so on. It’s pretty easy to use the Book Library, but you should still familiarize yourself using the tutorial outlined below.

1. How to Search for Books
2. How to Browse your Books
3. How to Print a List of Books
4. How to Add a Book
5. How to Add a Default Template
6. How to Edit a Book

This manual is also available as a PDF document.