Apologies for slacking on the blogging front here lately. Still mentally hung over from Open World, and lots of things going on behind the scenes here in Oracle-land. Whilst (love that word) blogging is part of my job, it’s not the ONLY part of my job :)

So a super-quick and dirty ‘trick’ this morning.

Copying Query Result Record as New Row in Table

Copy and paste is something everyone ‘gets.’ I don’t know we have to thank for that, whether it’s Microsoft or Xerox, but it’s been ingrained in our way of dealing with all things computers. Almost to the detriment of some of our users – they’ll use Copy and Paste when perhaps our Export feature is superior, but I digress.

Where it does work just fine is when you want to create a new row in your table that matches a row you have retrieved from an executed query.

Just click in the gutter or row number to get the entire row selected

Once you have your data selected, do your thing, i.e. ctrl+C or Command/Apple+C or whatever.

Now open your view or table editor, go to the data page, and ask for a new row.

New record, no data :(

Paste in the data from the clipboard.

It’s smart enough to paste the separate values out to the separate columns.

The clipboard saves the day, again.

If your columns orders are different, just change the order in the grids. If you have extra information, don’t copy the entire row.

I know, I know – Jeff this is too simple, why are you wasting our time here? It seems intuitive, but how many of you actually tried this before reading it just now?

I seem to get more positive feedback from the very basic user interface 101 tips than the esoteric click-click-click-ctrl-shift-click tricks I prefer to post.

Lots of interesting stuff on tap, so stay tuned!