Terry Reigel wrote: > The reason I suggested my practices with place would adversely > impact the index is my frequent omission of L4 to improve > readability. As I understand the resulting index it would produce > separate listings of most cities, one with and the other without > the county, which I see as undesireable. I don't regard that as any > fault with the index but rather an incompatibility between my > method and any automatically produced index. Terry, If you have place records where you leave L4 (county) blank, and some where you do not, then the place index in SS would have an entry for a place in that county in two places: one under the county, one not. However, you can get around that. If you single-exclude the county name, the place index feature in SS will collapse the two entries and treat them as the same place. See: http://ss.johncardinal.com/placeindex.htm#fieldexclusion As I am sure you know, I am not trying to convince you to use the place index feature in SS. My main goal is to make sure other SS users reading this thread understand how it works. John

On 9/8/2015 11:24 AM, John Cardinal via wrote: > If you have place records where you leave L4 (county) blank, and some where > you do not, then the place index in SS would have an entry for a place in > that county in two places: one under the county, one not. However, you can > get around that. If you single-exclude the county name, the place index > feature in SS will collapse the two entries and treat them as the same > place. See: http://ss.johncardinal.com/placeindex.htm#fieldexclusion > > As I am sure you know, I am not trying to convince you to use the place > index feature in SS. My main goal is to make sure other SS users reading > this thread understand how it works. Thanks for the clarification, John. It is now more clear that I've never used the place index. :-) I didn't know of that feature. That's a good solution to the issue I was envisioning. Terry

On Tue, Sep 08, 2015 at 11:24:41AM -0400, John Cardinal via wrote: > Terry, > If you have place records where you leave L4 (county) blank, and some where > you do not, then the place index in SS would have an entry for a place in > that county in two places: one under the county, one not. However, you can > get around that. If you single-exclude the county name, the place index > feature in SS will collapse the two entries and treat them as the same > place. See: http://ss.johncardinal.com/placeindex.htm#fieldexclusion > > As I am sure you know, I am not trying to convince you to use the place > index feature in SS. My main goal is to make sure other SS users reading > this thread understand how it works. John, Your field exclusion Help page has this sentence: "If Show Excluded Place Data is checked, the Place Index feature will treat place #1 and place #2 as the same place." For some reason I had never before appreciated the significance of that statement (possibly I never even read it?!). That is an excellent feature which I have just turned on in my various SDF files. John Cordes