The main window is divided into three parts: The menu/toolbar at the top of the window, the view bar to the left (if you can't see the view bar, choose View Bar from the View menu). The rest of the window is occupied by the active view.

There are a total of three different views: the Explorer View, the Program View, and the Lookup View.

In addition, you can create your own custom views, enabling you to easily access relevant information in your database (programs, publishers, etc.). For more information, see Customizing the view bar.

When you open a database, the program activates the Program view. To activate another view, click the view you want to activate in the view bar, or select from the View menu. For example, to activate the Explorer View, click Explorer View in the View bar, or choose Explorer View from the View menu. The Explorer is a fully featured browser integrated into the main window that allows you to search/browse your collection.

You find the three standard views under the 'Standard Views' heading in the view bar:

You can also select view from either the View menu, or the View toolbar:

As you can see, there are shortcuts you can use to activate the standard views (for example, press Ctrl + 1 to activate the Explorer view).

Note: To work with a lookup table (for example Publisher or Category), first activate the Lookup View, then select the desired lookup table from the Lookup menu. If you often work a specific lookup table, we recommend you create a custom view to activate this table (by default, there are already links to the most used lookup tables under the 'Additional Views' heading, including Category, Platform and Publisher).

When you select one of the standard views, the program activates the view with the same settings loaded as the last time you used the view. This means that the same list layout, sort order, filter, and grouping definition are automatically activated.