Merging Categories

donanb

How can I merge two categories? There seems to be an option to do so in the edit categories window, but mine is not active. I've looked in the help menus, but am not finding anything with keyword "merge".

jacobs

In the Categories window, you should see the Merge Categories button at the bottom, to the right of the plus, minus, pencil and hear icons. It will be grayed out until you have two (or more) categories selected (by Command-clicking them). Once the Merge Categories button is active, click it and it will pop up a confirmation dialog box in which you can see the categories about to be merged, how many uses each has, and importantly, which one of the categories will be the one to survive as the merged category.

One important note: you can only merge categories and subcategories at the same level. So you can merge two main categories, but you can't merge a main category and a subcategory of another category. In order to merge two such categories, you need to first make them at the same level; that is, either make the sub-category a main category by dragging it out of its existing category, or make the main category a sub-category of the same main category which contains the other sub-category you want to merge with. Similarly, you can't merge two sub-categories of separate main categories; you first need to drag one of the ub-categories to be under the same main category as the sub-category you want to merge with.