Excluding records from display

You can hide records from your view, by excluding records that have some common factor.

To exclude multiple records based on a common factor:

Enter EXCLUDE with the relevant parameters on the Command line.
For example, the following command excludes all records with an “h” or “H” in column 3:
```
EXCLUDE ALL H 3
```
You can control whether the excluded records are completely hidden or are represented by shadow lines.
- To hide the shadow line for excluded records, enter SHADOW X OFF on the Command line The shadow lines disappear, and SHAD appears at the top left of the screen, indicating that there are records that are hidden because shadow lines have been turned off.
  You can also hide the shadow line for excluded records by deselecting the See shadow lines option, Excluded, on the relevant Editor Options panel.
- To turn on shadow lines for excluded records, enter SHADOW X ON on the Command line.
  You can also turn on shadow lines for excluded records by selecting the See shadow lines option, Excluded, on the relevant Editor Options panel.

EXCLUDE commands are cumulative; each successive EXCLUDE command increases the number of records already excluded.

To “unexclude” (redisplay) excluded records:

Enter RESET EXCLUDED on the Command line.

After you have excluded records, you can limit the effects of the FIND, FE, SHADOW and SORT commands to only those records that are excluded or only those that are not-excluded. You do this by including one of the following option parameters with the primary command:

X or EX: Affects only excluded records
NX: Affects only not-excluded records

For example, the following command finds all occurrences of the string “no”, “No”, “NO”, or “nO” in all not-excluded records:

FIND NO ALL NX

Note:

If neither parameter is used with the primary command, both excluded and not-excluded records are affected.
If an excluded record is affected by a primary command, either by using the EX parameter or by not specifying an EXCLUDE parameter, the record becomes not-excluded.