by Steve Lopez

Once again the mailbag determines the ETN subject matter. We're going to look at how to copy games from one database to another in Fritz8, and you won't believe how easy it is to do. It works very much like the process of copying files in Windows Explorer or copying text in a word processor.

Before we pitch on into it, there are two terms I'll use in this article to save myself some typing:

1. Source database -- the database you're copying games from
2. Target database -- the database you're copying games to

Your first step is to go to the game list window (shortcut: F12 on your keyboard). Open the source database (File menu/Open/Database). Highlight the games you want to copy; there are a number of ways to do this. You can hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and single-click on the individual games you'd like to copy. If the games are in a "block" (that is, adjacent to each other in the database), you can hold down the SHIFT key and use the down cursor (down arrow) key to highlight them after single-clicking on the first game in the "block".

But if you want to copy all of the games in a database, you can use a menu item or keyboard command to highlight the whole shebang. Go to the Edit menu and choose "Select all", or else you can use CTRL-A on your keyboard. All of the games in the game list will then be highlighted.

Once you've highlighted the games you want to copy, go to the Edit menu and select "Copy" (or else hit CTRL-C on your keyboard). It'll look like nothing happened, but what you've just done is tell the program that you want to copy the highlighted games.

Next you'll open the target database (again, File menu/Open/Database). You then go to the Edit menu and select "Paste" (or hit CTRL-V on your keyboard). You'll see this dialogue appear:

This is a confirmation dialogue, asking you to confirm that you do indeed want to copy the games. In the illustration, you can see that I'm about to copy 31 games from my Autosave database to another database called "Test". If this dialogue displays what you intend (as to source and target databases and the number of games), click the "OK" button. Boom! The games are copied and everybody's happy. Your newly copied games will appear at the end of the target database.

I told you it was easy...

Until next week, have fun!

© 2003, Steven A. Lopez. All rights reserved.
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