Part I <Selecting Data >

The first thing you need to do is to select the data you want to manipulate. In this tutorial, you want to calculate the total number of each type of patents. So, you will select the type of patents in the SUMMARY section, Design, Sir, Plant, Reissue and Utility, and select the “Count” number for each patent.

In order to select the specific data effectively, you will define the beginning and ending of the data by using New Block Open Condition and New Block Close Condition functions.These functions of Vect let you restrict the selection to blocks of data specified by opening and closing conditions.

Now, let's specify the beginning and ending of the data that you want to select.

3. Right click on “Type” and select New Block Open Condition from the pull down menu. A green block will appear showing the beginning of data and the area above it should appear in pink.

4. To specify the ending of data, right click on “Total” and select New Block Close Condition from the pull down menu. A red block will appear showing the end of the data and the data below it should also appear in pink.

(Note: All the pink regions show that those data will not be used for further manipulation. )

 The New Block Open Condition and New Block Close Condition are both called Block Restriction. After introducing the Block Restriction, your Input Data panel should look like the image below:

In this case, you only want to select the name of the patents– Design, Sir, Plant, Reissue and Utility– and do not want to include the green and red blocks, “Type” and “Total”. If you click any area of the first column now, “Type” and “Total” will also be highlighted in gray. In order to exclude those two texts from selecting, you have to apply Selection Exclusive.

5. Right click on the green block. Select Selection Exclusive from the pull down menu. Do Selection Exclusive for the red block as well. If you forgot to apply Selection Exclusive and you click on the first column, the gray highlighted region, which tells you that it's selected for further manipulation, will overlap the green block. Take a look at the image below. The green block on the left is before applying Selection Exclusive and the one on the right is after you have applied Selection Exclusive. You may see a slight color change in the green block on the right.

(Note: you can include the data back by selecting Selection Inclusive from the same pull down menu.)