Getting Started with Heurist

If you’re new to Heurist and want to get to get the most out of it as quickly as possible, then this is the course for you! This course is also ideal if you’ve explored Heurist a little on your own, but have the idea that there is probably an easier way of doing things. The course is full of handy hints and tricks to help streamline your Heurist experience. If you have recently taught yourself to use Heurist, but are not yet completely confident, you might find that this course still has a lot of information, which can save you significant amounts of time.

What is covered?

In this course we provide:

• a brief overview of Heurist, including exploration of a training database with a range of record types, fields, data, images and links, to give you a good idea of what Heurist can do and how it works overall.
• an introduction to data structure – the core record types and fields provided in every default database, the template databases and how to access them and how to customise your own structure.
• an introduction to creating your own record types and fields. The building blocks of Heurist are record types and fields. One can get a long way on the core examples provided with every database, but sometimes one needs something different. We cover the basics to get you going with creating your own.
• how to add data manually – we practise adding data to the training database. This provides valuable feedback to further understanding of how the structure interacts with data.
• how to view data – basic filters and searches, as well as different options for viewing your data.

This will provide you with the basic toolkit to get started with Heurist. See our Training page for the date of our next course and please email us if you want to enrol.

Please note that we also offer other courses which build off this one:

• CSV Imports with Heurist – this course covers importing data from CSV files. If you have been working in a spreadsheet, or another database, and can create CSV files which you want to import into Heurist, this course will take you through the process in detail, allowing you to practise in a training database.
• Dealing with Relationships – entities, attributes and relationships are the core of any relational database. Heurist deals with relationships in a much more straight-forward, intuitive way than many other relational databases. However, there are some important aspects of these relationships to understand and some tips and tricks to get the most out of the connections in your data (including teasing out some that you may not even have been aware of!).
• Advanced Heurist – (in prep) this course is aimed at experienced users of Heurist to cover some of the more advanced aspects such as faceted searches, feeding a website, reports, working with Heurist-IDs etc.