Essential features of The Compleat Botanica
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Features

So you're interested in what this software can do for you. You've come to the right place to find out.

Take a few minutes to look over the essential features of The Compleat Botanica by browsing these pages. You'll find tools to help you organize your plant collection, you'll see a different way to conduct research, you'll discover a new educational resource, and you'll learn how to publish and share your new found discoveries.

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Coreopsis lanceolata 'Tequila Sunrise'

Take a tour of the essential features
   7 key features of The Compleat Botanica

The Compleat Botanica provides all the essential tools needed to organize any collection of plants, whether it's a botanical garden, an herbarium, a personal garden, a field guide of native plants, a nursery's stock, a landscape designer's favorite selections, a horticulturist's research collection, and more.   ......................................

   16 more essential features of great botanical software

Great botanical software has features for botanical names, pictures, dimensions, colors, and more. Here's an overview of some features you'll appreciate.   ......................................

   Custom categories

We all look at the world from our own perspective. Making sense out of what we see and organizing what we've learned requires us to divide our new-found knowledge into groupings that match our world view.   ......................................

   Botanical spell-checker

Properly spelled botanical names are the key to unlocking the vast collection of data available about the Plant Kingdom.   ......................................

   Flexible specimen lists

Looking at long lists of data using traditional list boxes and spreadsheets quickly leads to eye fatigue. Trying to find the similarities and differences in text-only listings is a chore.   ......................................

   Data sharing

One of the great features of today's personal computers is the ability to share data between different software applications.   ......................................

   Pictures

With the affordability and convenience of digital cameras, it's become popular to capture snapshots of our gardens in bloom, our horticultural specimen, or even the bounty of our fruit and vegetable crops.   ......................................

   Local customizations

The days of measuring with cubits are long gone, but that doesn't mean we've completely eliminated the Babel surrounding measurement units.   ......................................

   Professional report styling

Preparing an organized and readable listing from your database is a common expectation of high quality software.   ......................................

   Family names

We're all curious about plants and how they're named. One of the delightful things about visiting a botanical garden is that everything is labeled with the botanical name and the family it belongs to.   ......................................

   Filters

When your collection of data reaches a certain size, it's essential to have a way to see just part of it. Zooming in on just those items of interest, gives you a focused view-port of your collection.   ......................................

   Botanical name display

The Compleat Botanica adheres to the official standard for botanical names throughout the software.   ......................................

   Multiple views

The Compleat Botanica uses the popular side-by-side views first made popular with Microsoft's Windows Explorer.   ......................................

   Plant tags / plant labels / plant markers

The Compleat Botanica can print labels in a variety of font styles, sizes and colors on plain paper stock or on you favorite printer sheet-feed sticky label stock.   ......................................

   Rich-text notes

It seems like there's never enough fields in a database to capture all of the diversity and special exceptions that we run into on real projects.   ......................................

   Multiple databases

The Compleat Botanica's database organization tools provide simple access to creating, deleting, backing up, and restoring databases.   ......................................

   WYSIWYG previews

Previewing your reports on screen before printing them saves time and prevents surprises. The Compleat Botanica's report preview feature allows you to see every aspect of your report before sending it to the printer.   ......................................

   Checklist of botanical names

The Compleat Botanica uses a checklist of botanical names which span twenty-three taxonomic ranks from regnum to varietas.   ......................................

   Precise colors

The Compleat Botanica uses common color names as well as the 884 colors of the Royal Horticultural Society's Colour Chart to record principal and accent colors.   ......................................

   Seasonal interest calendar

Assembling enough data to prepare a good calendar of seasonal interest presents a problem:  do you describe a season using using words like early-spring, or do you attempt to force-fit a season onto a calendar.   ......................................

   Measurements

Keeping plants well spaced is one of the most important rules for achieving optimal health and beauty. But remembering the mature height and spread of so many different species is impossible.   ......................................

   Finding data within your collection

Even with good filtering and sorting capabilities, it's hard to find something when you can only remember a name, a phrase, or part of a word.   ......................................

   Iconic data

Well written commentary is the cornerstone of every good documentary effort.  But so much of what we record in our diaries, journals, notebooks, and databases is subject to repetitive entries describing what we've learned.   ......................................

   Customized look and feel

We all have different preferences and needs when it comes to readability.   ......................................

   Pathfinder

Today's software is so approachable and intuitive to use that we can learn to use a new application just by poking around and looking at a few samples.   ......................................

   Publishing

Publishing your collection of plant data for the Internet is easy. Publishing to paper pre-press is a powerful alternative to the report generator.   ......................................

For an index to other topics see

   Getting started

 

Last reviewed March 25, 2004   

 

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