Changing a Misspelled Color Marking
One of the most common mistakes is misspelling or duplicating a Color Marking entry. To be removed from your drop-down menu choices, it must be corrected on all animal records with that misspelled or duplicated Color Marking. This includes animals of any status - Active, Sold, Reference, or Dead.
In this example, the Color Marking was entered as ‘Balck’ instead of ‘Black’.
As long as the undesired color is on any animal of any status, it will remain as a selection criteria option in the Color Marking Dropdown.
If you want to correct the spelling of a Color Marking or change it altogether, you can do so by using the group update feature to quickly update the incorrect Color Marking on each animal in your herd file that has the incorrect entry.
To speed things up, we suggest you make a smart group. To create the new Smart Group, click on the Cattle Tab > New Group and set the following criteria: status = blank so you will get all cattle listed and Color Markings = the incorrect color entry you want to change.
Enter the name of the group. For this example, "Change Color" was used as the group name. Leave the Group Type as Smart Group and for this example, select only Ear Tag, Color Markings and Animal Type for the columns to be displayed in the group. Then click on Create Group.
On the next screen, select only the incorrect Color Marking from the drop-down and leave all other criteria fields blank. Then click on Save Group.
The image below shows how our example group displays.
Select all of the animals in the group then click on Update Selected Animals > More Options > Update Color Markings > By entering one value and having it applied to all selected animals > Continue.
Then,
Type the correct Color Marking exactly how it is already in the dropdown or exactly how you want it to be > Update Color Marking then Close on the next screen. Tip: If, for example, Black is already in the dropdown then you need to type Black again rather than typing black to avoid creating a duplicate color entry as it is case sensitive.
The special smart group will now have zero animals because there are no more animals with the incorrect Color Marking. The misspelled Color Marking is no longer in the dropdown.
At this point you can choose to go to the smart group titled (from our example) Change Color > Edit Group > Delete this Group, to remove the now unnecessary smart group. Deleting the smart group does not delete any cattle data.