About Modifying Column Names

The Aliasing feature changes the names of dimension and summary columns in a Consolidated DivePlan or MultiLevel DivePlan. This feature is not available in Single Input DivePlans.

Models are not intended to meet the needs of every type of user. It would be time-consuming and inefficient to build models for a single user or type of analysis. Instead, models often contain information that is geared to several different types of user audiences, such as administrative users and general users, and different types of analyses, such as sales and finance. Depending on the type of analysis that you are performing or the audience that you are addressing, you might want to change the names of columns in a DivePlan to make that information more recognizable or accessible to a specific type of user.

In a MultiLevel DivePlan, for example, you can specify that DiveMaster must include a summary column that might otherwise be excluded in the combined model. You specify the summary column by aliasing the name of the column that has the same name as another column in a different model. With the alias feature, you can also delete a column from the DivePlan without removing the column from the model. Note that with DiveMaster you can also delete any User Defined or Date Rollup dimension that was added to the DivePlan.

When deleting a column using an alias, you can remove the column name by setting it to a blank, for example, "", in the Column Alias dialog box. Note that when you use an alias to remove a dimension, you are only removing it from the selected model. To remove the dimension from all of the models currently in the DivePlan, select one of the following options:

Select the dimension in the Elements panel, and select Add to Removed Columns or press Delete.
Select the dimension and drop it into the Removed Columns category. To move a dimension that is in the Removed Columns back to the Elements panel, select the column and select Delete.

Additionally, when either aliasing or removing a dimension using the options in the Column Alias dialog box, you can also select Apply to all models to globally add the alias name to the same dimension in all models of the DivePlan. However, selecting Clear alias only removes the alias name from the selected model; it does not remove the name from all of the models in the DivePlan.