There are a number of ways
to display game lists when you open up a database in ChessBase 8. There's
no "right" or "wrong" game list format; just use whatever's most comfortable
and informative for you. In this (and the next) issue of ETN, we'll look
at a number of ways to format your database game lists.
To select between the various
list formats, right-click in the game list to get a popup menu. Select "List
format" from the menu to get a submenu of several choices.
The first of these is "Full
Game Header". This provides you with the player names, tournament, ECO code,
year, result, and number of moves for each game. The rightmost column displays
abbreviations designating any annotation forms that are used in the games:
This is the default format
used by the ChessBase program. The advantage to this format is that it gives
you a lot of information about the game's players, location, etc. The disadvantage
is that it doesn't show you any of the moves to the games (you have to double-click
on a game to see the actual moves).
The opposite end of the
spectrum appears when you select "Moves only" from the "List format" submenu:
Now we've gone 180 degrees
in the opposite direction -- we see the opening moves of each game, but have
none of the "game citation" details as we saw in our first example.
There's a third option
that provides a little of each approach. If you select "Header and moves" from
the "List format" submenu, you'll get a display that combines a bit of both
previous list formats:
With this display, you'll
see the player names, year, result, and the first few moves of the games.
Notice with this last display
that there's a lot of empty space between the truncated header info and the
opening moves of the games. You can easily alter this spacing. Move your mouse
cursor to the grey line between "Players" and "Tournament" at the top of this
display. Your cursor will now resemble a two-headed arrow. If you left-click
on this line and drag to either the left or right, you can change the spacing
between the two columns of information:
By decreasing the spacing
between these columns, you can display more moves for each game. Note that this
technique also works with the default "Full Game Header" display; you'd typically
use this to increase the spacing between the player and tournament names so
that the full player names are visible.
You can also determine
at what point in the game the list of moves will begin; this is especially useful
for databases in which all the games are of the same opening. You likely already
know the initial move sequence in such a database; the later moves at which
variances start to occur will be more useful for you. If you want to change
this in the display, select "First move" from the "List format" submenu, type
in a move number, and whether it should be White's or Black's move. For example,
I've altered the list so that it begins with Black's third move:
Once you have the basic
format to a style that suits you, there are some additional minor tweaks that
you can make on the list format. We'll look at these in next week's ETN.
Until then, have fun!
©
2002, Steven A. Lopez. All rights reserved.
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