Some Tag Thoughts
Returning to the theme of what’s old is new again – and remember, I’ve been doing this for over five years now – this month’s Tip Sheet is dedicated to some subtleties of Tags. Tagging is at once the simplest and the most intricate feature of Concordance, and the evolution of this feature, and what it means to the reviewer, is worth considering.
A Brief History of Tags
To start at the beginning, you all remember Tags, right? The little checkboxes with labels that you could create (and misspell) on the fly to check during linear review or gather documents retrieved in a search? Until Concordance 9 came along, Tags were flat: no folders, no personal folders. If your team created 300 Tags, you had to wade through 300 Tags to get to what you wanted; I have often said that if you have 300 Tags, in a sense you might as well not have any.
In Concordance 8, you opened the Tag/Notes pane from the Browse or Table or Edit toolbar. You could move the Tag/Notes pane, and dock it to a side as well as to the top, or float it; that was about as customizable as it got. Admins could check Tags as Persistent in Tag Management, so that they could exist independently of any record.
Concordance 9 added two important elements to the look and use of Tags: the Task Pane, and Tag Folders.
Tag Folders offer a way to organize the clutter of lots of Tags, and a more efficient way to collect related Tags. For example, a folder called PRIVILEGE may contain individual Tags, such as Attorney Work Product, Attorney-Client Privilege, Privacy, Safe Harbor, and so on. When any of these Tags is checked, the folder is bolded, so that the existence of a checked Tag can be seen even if the folder is rolled up.A Tag Folder may contain other Tag Folders, but at bottom there must be at least one tag in each folder tree. Any folder created without a Tag below it disappears instantly, thought it cannot be directly deleted. Again here, Create query from tag(s) will collect all Tags in a folder, and in all subfolders.
Tip: When adding Tags below a folder, highlight the folder and click Add. When adding Tags at the root level, click any open area of the window before clicking Add.
• Accidental tagging of selected items (such as Search Hits) was trapped.
Since I’m sure most of you are more interested in the results of the database engine change than its details, let’s look at that second point.
When doing a full-text search, we are taught to use the Next Hit / Previous Hit buttons in the Browse toolbar. Sometimes, having located documents in a search, users will search for other terms within a document record using EDIT / Find, the standard MS Word-style simple “vertical” search tool. Find actually selects the hits as it finds them. When users employing Find would click on a Tag to flag the document, in prior versions this action actually embedded an Issue in a Note at the Find Hit. Disconcerting, and not what was intended.
In Concordance 10, this behavior elicits a polite message telling the user to SHIFT+CLICK to tag the selected hit if that is what is intended; otherwise, it is treated as a document Tag. The reference to Tools:Preferences is to an item in the Browsing preferences panel: Tag Action – Select the default action of double-clicking a tag. The choices are Apply tag (Default), and Displays menu. This warning pops up when the first choice is selected; when Displays menu is selected, the Tag context menu is offered in all cases, with the added entry at the bottom Uncheck issue.
Naming Strategies
You may have noticed that Tags sort alphabetically when entered. So how to dictate the order of display?
The answer lies in creative use of prefixes. For example, any Tag or folder preceded by, say, an underscore (_) character will sort at or near the top; names beginning with “z” or “zz” will sort at or near the bottom.
Let’s get a little deeper: If you want certain folders and certain tags within the folders to appear in a specified order, use numeric (01_, 02_,… 10_) or alphabetic (A_, B_) prefixes. With numeric, always use a leading zero to pad lists with more than 10 (and less than 100) items.
Grouping Random Records from Table View
Let’s say that you are examining a series of documents in Table view – perhaps a group of documents previously tagged as falling within the critical period. Your linear examination of these documents turns up a few dozen documents that you’d like to print to prep a deposition. How to print random documents in a single pass?
With the Tag Pane open, click to select the first record of interest in the table. Use CTRL+Click to select each additional record. When all are selected, right-click any open area in the Tag Pane and select NewTag. You might label the new Tag PrintNow. Concordance will ask whether you want to apply this Tag to all selected records. Say Yes. Then right-click on the PrintNow Tag label and choose Create query from tag(s). You can now print this set of images to Concordance Image.
When this set is completed, you can re-use the PrintNow Tag by removing the tag from selected documents, selecting a new set, and clicking the PrintNow Tag afresh.
Importing Tags from Other Databases
There are a couple of ways to bring a set of Tags from one database to another; one involves use of two common CPLs, and the other takes advantage of a property inherent in Tags themselves. The CPLs in question are TagToField_v10.00.CPL to write current Tags to a specified paragraph field; and FieldToTag_v10.00.CPL to write from the field, once imported to a second database, to its Tag list. You may create and export a dummy record with all Tag checked, then import it to a second database; when the process is completed, you may then simply delete the dummy document record.
The second method is even simpler: temporarily concatenate the database you want to copy Tags from with the database(s) you want to copy Tags to (that is, don’t save the concatenated list, just click DONE). Check all Tags in a record in the second and subsequent databases. Clear the concatenation list, and open the second database. All Tags should be there. Search for the document holding all the Tags and clear the checkmarks. All Tags are persistent in Concordance 10, so the Tags will remain associated with the second database. Do the same for any subsequent databases.
Importing Tags from Lists
You can import a list of Tags (each ending in a semi-colon) by copying and pasting it into an extra paragraph field, then using the FieldToTag¬_v10.00.CPL. Remember, you need the “»” character (ASCII 187) to indicate a Folder hierarchy. When finished, untag the document and clear that field.
There is a second way that hearkens back to the days of Persistent Tags: writing to the [TAGS] section of the database’s .INI file. I have had uneven results trying this in Concordance 10, so caution is advised.
The .INI file is a text file in the database folder having the same filename as the database and holding various general and user configuration parameters and settings for the Concordance database. Sections are identified in brackets. To define our Tag section, we can enter (or paste) in material in the following format:
[TAGS]
Tag01=__RELEVANT
Tag02=_NOT RELEVANT
Tag03=_REQUIRES FURTHER REVIEW
Tag04=PRIVILEGE»Attorney-Client Privilege
Tag05=PRIVILEGE»Attorney Work Product
Tag06=PRIVILEGE»Privacy
The views expressed in this Concordance Tip Sheet are solely the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of U.S. Legal Support, Inc. Concordance has released the Concordance 10.07 update as of the end of October; finally, Tag Rename is real! Look for a further point release in December or so to provide Windows 7 support.
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