Tips on copying material/sources from portfolio to another portfolio
QUESTION: A customer recently asked how to quickly copy the contents of a source list/bibliography directly from a composition into a new portfolio. He has several portfolios which contain materials and sources from documents/books which he now wants to use in a new set of papers.
ANSWER: If you want to copy sources from a specific composition, open the Library folder and find the subfolder called “library cited by composition”. This gives you a complete list of the sources in each composition in that portfolio. To copy the entire list of sources or a selection of the sources to a new portfolio hold down the shift key and just click through the list until you have highlighted the sources you want to copy. Then just drag them to the open new portfolio window and drop them on the open Library folder.
If you are dragging the sources into a portfolio that already has sources in that portfolio, the newly added sources might be hard to find, so here is a tip. Tag the sources before you copy them across by simple changing the “status”. Highlight all the sources in the list, right click and change the status to something you can easily recognize like “new chapter”. [You can instantly add a new status by clicking on the green plus sign in the “Status” pop up box]
Once you have dragged the items to the new portfolio/libray folder, click on Status column to sort the list by status type. From there you can simply copy them straight into a new composition to instantly create a new bibliography.
You can use this same process to copy materials (ideas, quotations…) into a new portfolio. Just go to the Material Folder on the homepage and click on the subfolder called “Materials by Composition”. This gives you a complete list of compositions in a portfolio, and in turn, all the Materials (ideas, quotations…) in each composition. You can highlight the entire list or a selected group of materials and drag them over into the Materials folder of the new portfolio. Again, if you want a quick way to find the materials in the new portfolio, just highlight the list and right click to change the “status” of the items before you drag them into the new portfolio.
A huge time saver to remember is that when you drag a Material (idea, quotation…) from one portfolio to another IdeaMason automatically takes the associated sources with it. What this means is that any material in a composition that has associated sources that helped you “automatically” build your bibliography in an old composition, will do the same for you in a new composition.
When you first drag a material(s) with attached sources into a new portfolio, the material(s) will get inserted into the Material Folder and the associated sources will get inserted into the Library folder for general use. If you then drag that material (idea, quotation…) into a new composition, the associated sources will automatically get inserted into the Source List tab within the new composition. This instantly creates your bibliography list without even having to drag those sources independently from the old portfolio to the new portfolio.