Monday, November 16, 2009

For Title Plants: Section Land Speed Entry

New to halFILE 3.0 is a feature called “Quick S-T-R” that is designed to allow users to quickly enter section land in a single box as it reads on the document. This will dramatically reduce the amount of time required to key section land.

When this feature is enabled, a special box labeled Quick S-T-R is provided for the entry. Then, if the document reads:

"The NW quarter of the SW quarter of Section 36, Township 104N, Range 31E"


The user can key the following into the Quick S-T-R box:

NW SW 36 104N 31E

Furthermore, if all the Townships in the county have a direction of North and all the Ranges in the county have a direction of East, then the above description can be entered as:

NW SW 36 104 31

And the system will add the N and E for North and East, respectively.

This speed entry feature is set up as follows:

  1. Go into the halFILE Administrator and select the File_Base Edit menu.
  2. Select the database for which the option should be set up, then select the Tools-Options menu.
  3. Go to the Quick S-T-R tab and check the “Enable Quick S-T-R” checkbox.
  4. Select the appropriate Township and Range direction options.

Once this is saved, the Search and Index forms will include the Quick S-T-R box. The operation works as follows:

  1. On the main form when you reach the Township-Range field you can press F2 or click the question mark to pop up the Township-Range Base Edit form.
  2. The Quick S-T-R field will be highlighted in yellow and the cursor will be positioned in the box, ready for data entry.
  3. Enter the quarters, section, township and range with a space between each element. Example: NW SW NE SE 15 104N 31E
  4. For Index, click or tab to the ADD button to validate the entry and add it to the Index Information box.
  5. For Search, click or tab to the ADD ALL LEVELS button to validate the entry and add it to the Index Information box.

If you do a lot of Section Land data entry, you should give the Quick S-T-R feature a try!