Discounting Price Across Your Entire Database

A recent technical support email asked if there was a way to discount his prices across the board in ComicBase—say, set all his prices to 90% of their guide values.

Indeed there is, and it involves the biggest, bluntest tool in ComicBase’s toolbox: the Mass Change command. (Comics > Mass Change). This is a command that, I’ll say up front, you should almost never use. As the name implies, it performs massive changes across either whole titles or even the entire database. It is absolutely not for regular data entry.

That said, there may be one or two times during your use of the program where Mass Change is indispensable—doing global discounting being a perfect example. Just use Comics > Mass Change to pull up the Mass Change dialog, select the field you want to change (in this case, the selling Price), and choose whether you want to set it to the contents of another field, or to a fixed value. In this example, we’d choose to set Price to the contents of the Year 4 [2007] value field: the book’s current value:

On numeric fields like this, you also get the option of applying some additional math to the change. In this case, we’re multiplying the guide value by 0.90, effectively setting the current price to 90% of the guide value. You can further choose to have Mass Change to apply smart rounding to the result: rounding small values to the nearest nickel, larger amounts to the nearest, dime, quarter, dollar, etc. as the value scales up.