Original publication date: September, 2006

Setting Field Defaults for Picklists

What do the following Softshare 'CATS fields have in common?

Company Veteran
State
HUBZone
Language Used
Action Item
Race
Program Format

All of these fields feature drop-down picklists. In other words, the values assigned to these fields are chosen from predefined lists. Although only seven of Softshare 'CATS' drop-down picklist fields are listed here, you will find more than 40 of them throughout the various data entry forms.

There's something else that these drop-down picklist fields have in common: they support default values. And the system administrator for your program determines what those default values are. For example, if your center typically works with companies whose owners have never served in the military, the system administrator can set a default value of "Non-veteran" for the Company Veteran field. Similarly, if the majority of conferences your center hosts are defined as seminars, the system administrator can set a default value of "Seminar" for the Program Format field.

Default values for drop-down picklist fields are established from the Picklists page of WinCATS' global configuration settings. The only exceptions to this are when setting default values for the Milestone Type and Investment Type fields, which is done from the Milestones or Investments page of the global configuration settings.

Default values auto-fill when you create new records so whenever commonly-used values are set as drop-down picklist field defaults, you're decreasing your data entry workload. Always a worthy endeavor!