Renaming or deleting items in a workspace; Undo in the Explorer tree to reinstate or re-order

Met briefly in Section 1 and again above, renaming or deleting windows in the Explorer tree is an essential part of keeping a workspace navigable and understandable, especially since workspaces for many real analyses can become voluminous! Renaming is accomplished in one of three ways: as mentioned above, by clicking twice (slowly) on the entry name and typing directly into its box; by taking File>Rename Data (this changes to Rename Results, Rename Resem etc, depending on the entry type); or by right-clicking when over the Explorer tree to obtain a ‘floating’ menu which includes a general Rename Item operation. If part of an analysis is wrong or unhelpful, and you wish to delete it altogether from the workspace, a similar pair of options exists: click on the results name or icon and take File>Delete Results, or from the floating (right-click) menu take Delete Item. This results window, and all items below it on the same branch (its derived windows) will be erased from the workspace. You are prompted with the entry name to make sure that this really is the window (and derived windows) that you want to delete.

Note that in PRIMER 7 such a deletion is now a reversible operation, with File>Undo Workspace, which can be operated repeatedly to back-track through many successive Delete and/or Rename steps on the File> menu (though not, of course, Save, Close, New or Open operations since they are either easily back-tracked in other ways or are patently irreversible – such as saving to external files, or closing a workspace and ignoring the warning to save it first). You might like to try this out on the current Bristol Channel zooplankton workspace (save it first before you experiment!). Note what happens on reinstatement of branches or terminal windows (often plots) after deletion: they are added back, as might be expected, to the end of the stack of items at the same branch level, rather than the precise position from which they were removed (of course they retain exactly the same hierarchical position in the Explorer tree structure). One by-product of repeated deletion and reinstatement could thus be a limited ability to re-arrange the main strands of an analysis or the order of duplicated plots (e.g. a range of bubble plots, see next section) within the Explorer tree.