Users can enter free text into an experiment by choosing a Text paragraph section type, when adding a section.
Once the section has been added, click the Edit icon in the section header to open a text editor. An intuitive text editor will open that allows users to enter free text and offers the following basic functionality (find a more detailed description of all functionalities of the text editor here)
- Text formatting - bold, italic, underline, superscript and subscript
- Text import - import from Word with or without mark-up
- Text Styling - font type, size and color of text
- Lists - ordered and unordered list
- Alignment - text alignment left, right, centered, or justified
- Links - link other experiments or external sources
- Images - upload images and include them in text section (Please note that images saved in images sections cannot be downloaded separately and may have lower resolution)
- Symbols - symbols, special characters and Greek letters in lowercase and uppercase
- Mendeley Reference Manager - insert a link to Mendeley Reference Manager (only available if activated)
Enter the text and click the Save button to store the information in the ELN. A new version of the data will be stored, and the section footer will automatically be updated with the date and time of the most recent edit.
While a user is editing a section, the section becomes locked for other users to prevent collaborators from overwriting each others' data. When a user attempts to open a section that another user is editing, they receive the following notification:
Auto-save and Data recovery
While editing a text section, its content is automatically saved every 3 minutes. This enables users to recover any unsaved changes to a text section in the event that they do not save the section before navigating away from an experiment. The next time the user opens the text section, they will be given the option to restore unsaved changes.
Click OK to open the unsaved changes in the text section. Users can restore a previous version if they decide not to keep the unsaved changes.