Version 4.1

Fixed two small issues in AviSys import. 1) embedded quotes caused the import to fail; 2) location names that were simple numbers (e.g. 1234) caused the import to fail. Fixed in v4.1.55
When using Add Name in Checklist Entry mode and you add a Thing that is not in any of the selected taxonomic lists for this Entry Session, once you check that new Thing as Seen, you will get a fatal error. This has been fixed. v4.1.54.
Build 53 truly fixed the SmartSearch issue with Thing doesn’t exist in specified Taxonomy. v4.1.53
With Build 49, we fixed an issue with SmartSearch fields reporting Thing doesn’t exist in specified Taxonomy. Unfortunately, the fix introduced a new unforeseen issue. Build 52 corrects this issue that reports the same message. v4.1.52
With expanded support for Alias Names in Taxonomy Import files starting with version 4.1.48, we have decided to add a more user-friendly way of editing Alias Names for Things that using the Thing Editor (an advanced feature). The new Alias Names Editor is available under the Toolbar | Advanced | Alias Names Editor menu option. With this editor, you can add your local names for things that don’t come preset with Birder’s Diary. These names will transcend taxonomy updates and stay with your database. By adding these names to your database, you will be able to refer to these names when in a SmartSearch field that allows for entering names. You still set preferred common names in the Taxonomy Viewer (F8) or the Alias Language Region feature available under the Advanced Features. You can also access this Alias Names Editor from the Rosetta Stone and from the Taxonomy Viewer (popup menu). v4.1.52
Fixed issue when typing in a valid name into a Name field and the user gets a message indicating that this Thing does not exist in the specified taxonomy. For example, if the user would select Clements 2016 and type in “Leach’s Storm Petrel”, you would get this message. This is because that is the common name in use by the IOC 6.3 taxonomic list and the Clements 2016 list uses a hyphen as in “Leach’s Storm-petrel”. So, while the SmartSearch field matched on what you typed in, it wasn’t in the specified taxonomic list. Now, SmartSearch treats all non-alphabetic characters as wildcard, and the previous example would find the right name without the warning message. v4.1.49
During Reconcile, you now have 4 new features on the Reconcile Sightings for XXX (window 2 of the process) window. These are convenience features that makes the Reconcile process faster. v4.1.49
- Auto Return checkbox automatically returns to the previous window when all sightings have been assigned.
- Disable Confirmation checkbox will disable the confirmation prompt.
- Right-click on the Sightings window for an option that allows you to select all sightings in the grid. Convenience shortcut.
- If you haven’t selected any sightings before you click either Assign button, you will be asked if you meant to assign ALL sightings.
Taxonomic updates and new lists going forward will contain alias names as well as descriptions for Kingdom through Genus (if they exist for that taxonomic list). This will require version 4.1.48 or later to support this extra data and you will not be able to use newer taxonomic lists with older versions of Birder’s Diary going forward. v4.1.48
When using the Endemics option on Checklist reports, the first of either Common Name or Scientific Name found in the list of columns will be Capitalized. Prior to this release only Common Names, if specified, would be capitalized. v4.1.48
New Birder’s Diary News and Information window and format. Easier to read and utilize. v4.1.48
If you have a lot of Sightings Attachments (e.g. photos attached to sightings), the backup process can take a long time while you wait. Now Birder’s Diary spawns a subprocess to complete the Attachments backup. This backup happens in the background. No more waiting! v4.1.48
When editing a location from the Locations window, a new feature has been added at the bottom of the Location Edit window that allows you to quickly add pre-existing or new locations as children. NOTE: to remove children, you cannot use this window, but rather edit the child from the main Locations window and remove its parent.
In Sightings Entry, Checklist Mode Only, if you roll your mouse over the list of names on the left, you will get a popup showing all sightings of that name in your database, if that name has any sightings. If you double-click on a sighting, you can edit that sighting. v4.1.48
In the Compare and Contrast Sightings feature , if you roll your mouse over the list of names in any of the 3 tables/grids, you will get a popup showing all sightings of that name in your database. If you double-click on a sighting, you can edit that sighting. v4.1.48
In the past, Country was an abstract meaning in the Virtual Hierarchy of the Birder’s Diary Location Tree. Since you can create any location and hierarchy that you want, there was no way of knowing what the Country for any given location was; let alone use it in Reports where you could output it or even group Sightings by Country. Well, the wait is over! Every location in Birder’s Diary now has a Country associated with it if it is indeed appropriate. If a location resides anywhere under a Country, then that Country can be selected and output on reports. You can also group by Country on reports. If the location itself is a Country, then the Country field will also output that name. If the location does NOT have a country associated with it, e.g. Pacific Ocean, then the Country field will contain it’s own name, e.g. Pacific Ocean. v4.1.46
Added tooltip popup for Location fields on the View Sightings grid and the Reconcile Sightings grid when you hold your mouse over a Location field in the grid. It will display the entire path of the Location. Formerly, deeply nested locations displayed in these grids would leave the user wondering where the location is. Now you can quickly find out by hovering your mouse pointer over the location field. v4.1.45
Corrected issue when Reconciling that changed the Sighting Order of Entry for a sighting of a Thing that was Reconciled. This would throw off Life List orders for Lifers entered on the same day after Reconcile. v4.1.45
Report indenting now uses less space and correctly indents data rows under Group-By headers.

In the past, the data rows started at the far left incorrectly. v4.1.44
In Sightings, Checklist, Life List, and Trip reports, you have a new field to select from which is the concatenation of Family Latin Name and Family Description. The purpose of this is to be able to Group By this field and have it display on one line.

You couldn’t do this in the past without having to group by each of these independently and creating unnecessary indenting. v4.1.44
In Sightings reports you have a new field to select from which is the concatenation of Common and Scientific Names. The purpose of this is to be able to Group By this field and have it display on one line.

You couldn’t do this in the past without having to group by each of these independently and creating unnecessary indenting. v4.1.44
When sorting a Report on Sighting Date/Time the Order of Entry is automatically included as a secondary sort so that within the same date/time, sightings are sorted by Order of Entry. There are times when one may not want this Order of Entry added to the sort order automatically. A new setting has been added to the Output Columns pane to turn this off. v4.1.42
You can now add Latin Family and English Family names to your Sightings View grid! v4.1.41
The Sightings Attachment feature now allows for selecting multiple files instead of just one at a time. v4.1.41
Fixed bug in Checklist Entry – Trip Style, where the count at the bottom of the window was not updated properly if you checked off sightings by entering a number in the count field. v4.1.41
On the new Export to eBird Import File window, instead of always prompting the user to open the exported file in the default editor, there is now an option to trigger that prompt. v4.1.41
Included a Mute All Sounds option for Birder’s Diary. This will prevent any sound originating from Birder’s Diary. Find it on the View | Options … General TAB. v4.1.40
Fixed bug in export of Date and Time values for eBird. eBird does not want ‘seconds’ in their imported time value if any is provided. Removed seconds from export feature. v4.1.40
Fixed bug with status bar at bottom of window. If the status bar was already showing and another process showed it again, the status bar reports incorrect values and data. v4.1.38
Fixed bug with the new Endemic checkbox on the Sightings Report Tab. When used, the results were unpredictable. v4.1.38
Fixed bug only encountered once on a user converting from AviSys. They had a circular reference in their location hierarchy that wasn’t handled correctly in Birder’s Diary import. Fixed. v4.1.38
Users requested ability to copy selected Sightings Attachments to a new directory. With this feature, the user can setup a slide show of the selected photos, or incorporate selected files into a PowerPoint presentation; among many other things. This feature has been added to the View Sightings Window, under the popup menu. Each selected sighting will have its attachments copied to the user-selected directory. If no sightings are selected, then the current row under the mouse when the popup was activated will be copied. v4.1.37
The Life List report has always been a list of sightings that were the first sighting for each species seen within the report parameters (e.g. observer, dates, location, UDF, etc). If your first sighting of a species was recorded at the subspecific level, then your Life List report would report that sighting on the Life List report (e.g. “Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon’s)”, “Setophaga coronata auduboni”). Users wanted the option for this report to simply list the species regardless of whether the first sighting was at the subspecific level. This feature has been added to the Life List Report. v3.1.37.
The Copy Buffer option is not meant to be used with PDF or RTF Save-to-file options on the “Preview and Print/Save Report” window. When either PDF or RTF are selected the Copy Buffer option will be disabled and unchecked. It can be enabled again by choosing another output option. v4.1.37.
Fixed bug with non-US date formats with certain dates on Sightings Entry. v4.1.36.
Fixed bug introduced in v4.1 change to the Taxonomy Copy feature. v4.1.36.
Added ability with the new RichText capability for Sightings Comments to set the default font for RichText comments. It was previously fixed with the Arial font with no way to change it. v4.1.36.
Fixed report title sizing issues. v4.1.35.
Report titles also appear in smaller text at the bottom right of each page. v4.1.34.
Long report titles no longer overrun the numbers on the right of the report. They wrap on the left side as they should. v4.1.34.
The new 4.1 ALWAYS ONLY UDF functionality did not roll up subspecies sightings when using this logic. Fixed in v4.1.34.
When importing sightings, the user will be asked how to deal with unknown locations. This window will now remember your last select from the 4 options. It used to always come with option #2 pre-selected. v4.1.34
When importing Sightings via the new v4.1 “Import Sightings from CSV-formatted File” option, Observer first and last name are no longer required to be in the import CSV file. If not present, you can specify the Observer in the dropdown and the import will complete successfully with that observer being assigned to all sightings. This is helpful for many Apps and programs that export CSV-formatted Sightings files, but do not include an observer name with the export. v4.1.34
Fixed bug in Keyboard sightings entry where you would not hear the TaDa music when entering a lifer. v4.1.33
Fixed bug in Backup where you would receive a “Path Not Found” error if you enabled Sightings Attachments backup and had yet to ever attach a photo/document to any sighting. v4.1.33
Fixed bug in the Quick Counts window where a non-MM/DD/YYYY date was interpreted incorrectly. v4.1.33.
Fixed bug in sightings entry date fields wherein it incorrectly reports the date as being in the future. v4.1.32
Improved the speed of rebuilding the Location Performance table by 63%! Some folks were getting some pretty large Location hierarchies in their database! v4.1.30
Added new feature to the Multiple Species Abundance Graph. Now there is a new Export button that will export the data (actual numbers) from the graph to a CSV file (Excel compatible) so you can do number crunching for bird counts etc. It supports 52 columns for a summing period of 1 week, 12 columns for a summing period of 1 month, and 4 columns for a summing period of a quarter. v4.1.25
Added new window for locating and removing Orphaned Sightings in your database. You can access this new feature from the main menu under Toolbar | Advanced | Orphaned Sightings…. v4.1.24
Added new button on the View Sightings Setup to select all licensed taxonomies. v4.1.24
In v4.0, during Backup, you had the option of choosing whether to make a copy of your Sightings’ Attachments as well for backup purposes. This is very important if you keep attachments for some of your sightings. In v4.0, it would create a ZIP file of all your sightings’ attachments. This was problematic and took a long time. In v4.1, copies are made of new files added since the last backup and placed in a subdirectory of your backup file location. No ZIP file is created. Next time you create a backup, only new files since the last backup will be copied. This streamlines the process greatly.
You can now Export Sightings from the View & Edit Sightings window in Birder’s Diary to an eBird Import File that you can import into eBird. You use the View Sightings Setup to select the sightings you want to upload to eBird. Then, in the View & Edit Sightings window you select the sightings (or select All) that you want to upload to eBird and choose the new eBird Export toolbar button to export those selected sightings into an eBird formatted import file.

This will open the Export to eBird Import File window allowing you to choose the proper options and create the import file that eBird can read.
All that is left is to log on to your eBird account and import the newly created import file containing your Birder’s Diary sightings. v4.1.16
Ever wish you could query on a UDF (user-defined field) in Birder’s Diary using an ALWAYS ONLY logic? For example, let’s say you have a Heard Only UDF of type Yes/No. You don’t want to know all the species sightings that had this as a Yes or a No, but instead you want to know which species are Only Yes and Never No. In other words, which species in my database do I have sightings for that I have never marked as Heard Only = NO? This will give me a list of species that I should focus on seeing. This is only one example of the Always Only logic now available. You can probably come up with more. You can now use the Always Only operator in the UDF Query window for every UDF data type available. v4.1.10.
Export Sightings feature on the Sightings Import/Export window will now export the entire path to your sighting location. Making it much easier for others to import your sightings when they may not have the same location hierarchy as you. For example, if your sighting location is “Home”, it will export and use the entire path in your hierarchy to “Home”, such as “World>United States>Colorado>Teller County, CO>Home” v4.1.8
Keyboard and Checklist Sightings Entry now informs you if the sighting you just entered is a new Annual record for the species at the highest location possible. In addition to letting you know if it is a Lifer bird at the highest location possible. If you have Petey displayed, then Petey will notify you of these events instead of a message window. You can keep this message window open during your sightings entry session to view alerts. You don’t have to close it after each alert. In Checklist Entry, it will alert you when you click the Seen checkbox. If you don’t have the location specified already, then it will alert you only if it is a World lifer or the first time you have seen this species anywhere in the World this year. This new window is also demo’ng a new look and feel to come to BD soon. Let me know what you think.
A new “Unrecognized Name on Import” feature has been created that allows you to import eBird Spuhs, Slashes, Hybrids, etc. Or you can assign the unmatched name to an existing Thing in the taxonomic list.
eBird import files carry more information than what is used directly by Birder’s Diary. For example, the All Observations export format contains fields like “protocol”, “latitude” and “longitude” to name a few. You can see the different columns names in the first record of the file if you open it in Excel or any text editor. This data is available for import and will be imported into a UDF (User-defined field) if you have created the UDF prior to importing the sightings. The BD import process prepends each eBird column name with “eBird ” (Note: the space at the end) such that Latitude becomes “eBird Latitude“. If you create a UDF with this name, that data will be imported into that UDF for each sighting record!
If you have 2 UDF fields with the word “latitude” and “longitude” in the name of the 2 different UDF fields, for example “eBird Latitude” and “eBird Longitude”, when using View/Edit you can right-click on that Sighting record and have it display a map in your browser with that location on it.
You can now Edit a Sighting’s Comment field from the View/Edit window using a Popup Menu. No need to use the Sighting Editor window just to update a Sighting’s Comments from the View/Edit window. Before this enhancement, you could only View the Comment from the View/Edit window. This is a big time-saver if you like to view and simply edit comments while viewing. v4.1.0
Removed More/Less button from Sightings Entry Setup. This feature from v3.0 has become seldom used as time has progressed. v4.1.0
You can now add eBird-recognized sub-national-regions for any Country in Birder’s Diary. Just right-click on the country in the Locations Maintenance window and choose the option from the dropdown. v4.1.0
All recognized eBird countries have been added to the Birder’s Diary Location database. v4.1.0
The eBird Toolkit that has been with Birder’s Diary since 2009 is being retired. All eBird functionality will now be integrated into Birder’s Diary version 4.1. And many new features to support eBird integration are being added to make exchanging data between eBird (both eBird-TO-Birder’sDiary and Birder’sDiary-TO-eBird) as well as accepting data from eBird Mobile Apps seamless and easy!!! Yes you heard me – Birder’s Diary v4.1 will now accept BirdLog mobile app exported eBird files and import them with no effort on your part!!! A huge THANK YOU to Dr. Gerco Hoogeweg that has made eBird functionality possible with his toolkit for Birder’s Diary since 2009! It has been enjoyed by thousands of Birder’s Diary users for 6 long years!
Enhancement. On Sightings Import, UDF Yes/No fields now allow the following values: True, False, T, F, Yes, No, Y, N and any whole number value where only zero is considered False. v4.1.0
Fixed bug in Sightings Import process where an error occurs if the header row has empty columns at the end of the record. v4.1.0
A new comments editor for sightings allows for Rich Text comments! You can now Bold, Italic, Underline text as well as add Bulleted Lists to your comments. You can also add line feeds, and blank lines in your comments. All of this improves readability in your comments as opposed to the prior continuous stream of text without line breaks or bulleted lists. This formatting is maintained for Sightings reports as well. v4.1.0.
SmartSearch Fields now treat spaces the same as asterisks and semi-colons. All three characters are treated as wildcard characters when searching. Spaces are much simpler to use than asterisks or semi-colons. Now, instead of typing ‘gr*wi*te‘ to bring up ‘Green-winged Teal’, you can simply type ‘gr wi te‘. This feature can be disabled in the Options window, General TAB. v4.1.0