DataWallet Basics

What is an Wallet?
DataWallet's Purpose
About Encryption
 
About Datasets

Dataset Organization
Columns
Rows
Cells or Fields

Using DataWallet
Creating a Wallet
Context Menus
The Wallet Pane
The Dataset Pane


What is a Wallet?

DataWallet is designed to safely contain all your private and confidential textual information in a single file .  Once the file is encrypted, you can store the result anywhere you'd like, even on a public web site.

DataWallet was written to help people protected themselves against identity theft, hackers and old-fashioned, garden-variety theft.  Most of us have a variety of paper organizers, Post-It notes, spreadsheets and other computer files that contain information that we not only need, but which could cause us harm if they fell into the wrong hands.  Most encryption solutions are either too general or too application-specific.

DataWallet creates files known as data wallets.  Each wallet can contain any number of distinct, named collections of data.  Each such collection is known as a dataset.   So, a wallet is an ensemble of datasets.

Dataset Organization

Every dataset has a structure consisting of named, orderered columns.  The actual data items in a dataset are organized into rows, as in a spreadsheet.  

In a dataset, you can move columns, rename them, create and delete them.  The same is true of the rows of information.

Each "cell" or individual field of information in a row is merely a string of text.  In other words, DataWallet does not know or care that the string represents a phone number, ATM PIN code or account number.  The only type of string information that DataWallet recognizes is a World Wide Web Uniform Resource Locator (URL); this allows DataWallet to link directly to a web site that you use frequently.

Using DataWallet

To create a sample wallet, launch DataWallet and choose one of the wallet templates from the Help menu.

Almost all of the actions you'll perform with DataWallet are controlled through "context menus". A context menu is a pop-up window that appears when you click the right-hand mouse button in a particular area.  The contents of the menus change according to where you've clicked and the data found at that location.

First, right-click on the title of your wallet in the left-hand pane of the DataSet window.  Choose "Rename" from the context menu and type in a name of your choice.

Then practice clicking on the dataset names in that pane.  You'll see that the contents of the right-hand pane change to show the detailed fields of that dataset.

As with the left-hand wallet contents pane, you'll control the right-hand dataset fields pane through the use of context menus.