The Custom Data Editor, accessible by pressing Shift-F9 or from the Windows menu, is a way to ease entering and manipulating your custom data, and specifying the source book for each item.
See also Bulk Data Entry for a powerful feature allowing the automatic entry of large amounts of data.
Click on the tab corresponding to the type of data you want to edit. Races, skills, feats, spells, psionic powers, standard items, standard weapons, conditions, classes and templates can all be edited within this consistent interface.
The list of items is displayed on the left. If both checkboxes are cleared, all items in your campaign are displayed.
Filter by text: Check this box to filter all the data based on a full-text search of both the name of the item and it's description. Enter the text to search in the box on the right (case is ignored). You can perform more complicated searches by combining strings, separated by semicolons. For example, psionic; evil will display only items with both psionic and evil in the name or description. To exclude items based on string, precede the text with a minus sign "-". For example, -amulet will not show any items with the word amulet. You can combine these techniques, psionic; -amulet; good; -evil will search for text with both psionic and good, but neither evil nor amulet.
Filter by source: Check the box to filter according to the sourcebook displayed in the list at right. You can also enter custom text to search for. The drop-down list includes all sources from the items of the selected type. An option in the drop-down list is empty – that is, you can filter to show only items where no source is specified. This is useful when importing data from a version of DM Genie before sources could be specified.
You can select multiple items in the list by shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking, as in other Windows interfaces. Select All will select all items automatically, whereas Invert Selection will unselect all selected items and select all unselected items.
The Source of a book can be any string – usually, the source string should be the item's sourcebook. For example, the core data that ships with DM Genie comes from the following sources: Player's Handbook 3.5, DMG 3.5, MM 3.5, and Psionics Handbook.
Sources of Selected Items: When you select one or more items in the list, this is updated to show which sources those items have.
Set source to: Type in some text or select a choice from the drop-down list to set the source for all displayed items. If you have some data already entered, you can use the filter by text function to help make selection easier (for example, if you've noted "Source: BookX" in all your custom items' description, simply filter for that string and select all filtered items).
The currently selected item's name and description is displayed on the right. You can edit both of these directly. Other, more specific data (like a class's data or a condition's modifiers) must be edited in their respective windows. Click the Edit... button to open the correct window for editing.
The description area is a rich text box – you can use Word Processor Commands like keyboard shortcuts, the right-click menu or the font bar to change the text formatting. The box has multiple levels of Undo.
See also Bulk Data Entry for a powerful feature allowing the automatic entry of large amounts of data.
The Create New button will prompt your for the name of your new item. A blank item is created – only the name and a simple description is added. Edit the description and/or use the Edit button to enter more data.
Copy will make a copy of all selected items. The name of the copied item is the same as the original but with " copy" added. All other values are identical.
Delete will remove the selected items from the current campaign.
Export... will open the export window (see Exporting Other Files ) with the same selection of items as in the Custom Data Editor. Click Add to add them to the list to export, and then you can save the file. For example, you could filter Feats by source to select BookX, then select all items and export them into a file named BookX.Feats.
Save will save the current type of data to disk.
Undo will re-load the current type of data from disk, essentially undoing all changes since the last save (note that DM Genie saves data automatically when windows are closed).