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In CMAssistant 6.3, at the top of the screen to the right of the Find button you will find a button labeled "Mark..." This button allows you to mark a found set and the same button is used later to find that found set again. This allows you to mark some records, switch to viewing the history for an individual drop, and then go back to the list of records that you started with, usually so you can proceed to select another drop and view its history.
You should not mark found sets that you can more easily retrieve by using the "find same" (equals-sign) buttons. You don't need to mark routes or issues. What then would it make sense to use Mark? When the found set is a customized found set of records: say, records delivered on a particular date that are in a special zip code, or whose locations are of a certain type, or whose draw > 100.
While you work in CMAssistant 6.3's DELIVS layout, you may find a handful of shortcuts useful.
The DELIVS layout in CMAssistant 6.3 has a Find menu that contains a number of important predefined finds for you to use. You should explore this menu.
Above most of the columns of same-data buttons, you'll see a > button. This allows you to view the next record in that column whose data is different. For example, in the screen shot below, the selected record is a delivery in the Downtown route. The records are sorted by route. If you wanted to view the next record in the list whose route was different, you'd click the > button to the left of the word "Route" and CMAssistant would jump down to the first record in the Downtown-Restock route.
This is especially useful if you're viewing sorted records and you can't see the next different record. If you're looking at the 91 records in the Arlington route, and you want to jump to a record in the Burlington route, this is the button for the job. If you're looking at all the deliveries for the current issue, and they are sorted by delivery date, you can move from a record for the first delivery date to the records for the next delivery date by clicking the > button above the delivery date column.
In the screen shot above, notice also the >> button. This appears only over the routes column. This allows you to tell CMAssistant what route you want to jump to by typing a couple characters from the start of the route name. Why is this useful? Well, let's go back to the earlier example where you're looking at a couple thousand records for your current issue, sorted by route name, and the selected record is in the Arlington route. If you want to view records in the West Arlington route, you could use the > button to jump from Arlingon to Burlingon, then from Burlington to Campus, then from Campus to Downtown, and so on until you get to West Arlington. Or you can click the button, type "wes" and hit Go and you're there.
CMAssistant 6.3 makes it easier than ever to see at a glance what is going on with your circulation system. Today's big news is the addition of a "calc recent waste" button. Want to know where all your problem drops are? Who your overachievers are? Average waste for the last six issues? The answers are one-click and a minute or two away. Here's a partial view of the results on screen:
CMAssistant 6.3: What you see after clicking on the Calc W% button.
NOTE:
In our tests on a pub with 2500+ active drops, analysis took 3 minutes (FileMaker Pro 10, Windows XP SP3).
At this point, you might want to narrow the found set to those records with waste over 20%. They're easy to find because their waste is displayed in a red font. After narrowing down the number of deliveries you're dealing with, mark them using the new "Mark Found Set" button, then start looking at each drop's history and making changes as needed. After you edit a drop, use the Retrieve Marked Records command to get your previous found set and go to the next record. Modesty schmodesty: We think it's brilliant.
NOTE that the Waste Watcher is replacing the attempts in earlier versions of CMAssistant to determine drop amounts automatically for you. Over many years, working with many different licensees, we released—perhaps a bit more slowly than we should have—that it's easy for CMAssistant to tell you where you can and perhaps should decrease the drop, but it's nearly impossible for CMAssistant to tell you where you should increase the drop. All drops seem eventually to reach a "sweet spot." That is, you may have a drop where you leave 50 papers each week and have zero waste, week after week after week. But raise the drop to 60 and you start getting 7, 8, 9 copies waste. It's up to you, the circ manager, to know when a drop has reached its sweet spot. Use the CMAssistant Waste Watcher to help you identify problem drops and fix them.
For more info about the user interface in CMAssistant 6.3, go to the advanced topics page, here.