There are three ways to open a selected record for editing. Highlight the record in the search results box on the Main Menu, then: double-click it, press Enter on your keyboard, or use the Edit button.

If you change the information and then try to Save Changes, ODB will perform a few checks on what you have entered. If you did not enter a complete address, for example, ODB offers to mark it as "Address Incomplete" so that you can exclude it when printing mailing labels.

If an address has previously been marked as bad or incomplete, and you change the address, ODB automatically asks you if you would like to erase the "mail code."

ODB provides separate fields for street number and street name on the third line. This feature is very useful for local organizing, to make it easy to generate a listing for door-to-door canvassing within a city or town. It also makes it possible to automatically identify a person's ward or precinct. If you put a street address on Line 2 of the address ODB will suggest that you put it on the third line, and offer to move it for you.

If everything is okay (no bad email addresses, duplicate records, etc.), the data entry screen will close, bringing you back to the Main Menu.

If you don't want to make any changes, or you accidentally delete some information, use the Cancel button to exit the data entry screen without saving changes. If you abandon changes when entering a new (or "Cloned") record, the new record will not be added to the database.

Type Code. The pull-down menu named "Type:" appears on the bottom half of the Entry screen, next to the "Mail" menu. This code is used to assign each record to a particular group. Types are not "overlapping" categories, which means a person may not be assigned more than one "type." This code is very useful to efficiently segment your mailing list. If you have assigned a type to every contact, you can send different letters to different groups, with confidence that no one has been left out. Because "type" is not an overlapping category, it also means that you will send a letter only to each person once, without worrying that people will get duplicate letters because they fall into more than one category. You may completely customize the list of types that appear in the pull-down menu, as described in Section B.

Non-U.S. Addresses. ODB is designed primarily for use in the United States. If you need to enter an address outside the United States, we recommend that you put the name of the country and any postal code in the "City" field, and then fit any remaining information on the lines labeled "Line2" and "St./Address." When the item is travelling over water - this would be anything except US territories or Canada or Mexico - we recommend that you put the words "AIR MAIL" in the two ZIP code fields. Sometimes, you might find it useful to put the postal code in the two portions of the ZIP code field; this can be done with Canadian postal codes, for instance. (Note: if your list has a large number of international addresses, it is possible to add a "country" field to ODB, described in section B, although we recommend against this in most cases, so that you will not have more address lines than will fit on a standard label.)

Special Fields for Organizing Tasks. In addition to the typical contact information (name, address, phone number, email address, etc.), ODB provides several other standard fields that are useful for organizing. You can enter a person's federal Congressional District, state Senate and House Districts, and local Ward and Precinct. ODB also provides fields for marking a person's voter registration status and party, and preferences to not have their name sold or traded, not to receive mass email (spam), and not to be called for fundraising purposes.

Other Fields. Several other fields are included on the Entry screen; not all of these can be edited. They include the date you first created the record, date it was last modified (changed and saved), date of the last donation, date the person joined as a member, and the date her/his membership expires. There are also a number of fields hidden in the standard template that can be turned on, such as fax, country, date of birth, gender, salutation, a person's title or suffix, and 2 user-defined fields. For details about how to turn them on, see Section B.

Comments. The comments field allows you to record extra details, from a phone conversation for instance, in each record. We strongly recommend that you limit the use of comments, because data entered this way is hard to search, sort, and maintain over time. If you run out of space, you can increase the number of characters allowed in the field, as described in Section B, or enable the "Notes" feature as described in Section E.