As mentioned in the introductory topic, click on a checkbox under the first column for any row in the Object Grid will select the entire row:
However, click on a single cell under any of other columns in the Object Grid, will only select that specific cell and the field value displayed in it:
The two selection mechanisms serve different purposes:
Selecting an entire row in the Object Grid is exactly the same as selecting an object, as each row represents a single object and is useful for accessing the full set of context menu options supported by the selected object.
Selecting an individual field or vertical series of fields is more like cell selection in a spreadsheet and is used for similar purposes, such as bulk update of the same field across multiple objects.
There two ways by which selection can be visually distinguished:
by the highlight color - the row selection highlight color is yellow, while the field selection highlight color is blue
by the text label under the Object Grid (next to the "Showing x to y of z entries" label), which explicitly says whether a cell or a row is selected.
In addition to selection of individual cells and ranges of contiguous cells, much like spreadsheets, the Object Grid also enables directly copying Object Grid cell data to a spreadsheet. The purpose of this feature is to enable simple copy operation of ranges of values from the Object Grid into some external software via the clipboard.
This can be easily done by selecting the appropriate cells in the Object Grid and selecting the Copy Cells context menu option:
For example, if you want to add some serial numbers to the selected set of Equipment, it is easy to get the right list of Equipment in the Object Grid, and then to easily extract the names of those Equipment objects to a column in a spreadsheet, to which the serial numbers could be added and then the result used as a DDR Import sheet, for example.
Another convenience of this feature is that the cell data displaying units can optionally be copied with or without the unit. This is controlled by an User Settings option - Copy Cell Data With Units in Object Grid:
This situation is analogous to cases in spreadsheets where sometimes the user wants to paste the final data, sometimes the formatting, sometimes the formula, etc. By default, cell data is being copied with units, as displayed in the User Settings screenshot.
For example, if you want to add data about currently tested length of a specific set of Cables, it is easy to get the right list of Cables in the Object Grid, which may or may not have tested length in the same unit:
