Tips for entering your event

Important

• About venues: A venue is a named location. Several thousand venues in Northeast Ohio are already in our database and available from the venue list. Please try to select from the list of places before creating a new venue record.
• More about venues: If you do create a new venue, please use the name of the venue ("Severance Hall," "Pickwick & Frolic") in the name space and use the venue form only for information about the location, such as the address, that would be true for any event there.
  
  
• Please create a separate entry for each new event title. Each individual event can have many dates.
• Please do not type in ALL CAPS.
• Please be concise.
• Please be aware that special formatting you enter may not appear as you expect it to. For best results, keep your entry simple and rely on smart wording to make it stand out.
  
  
• A word about Word: If you use Microsoft Word and your entry includes curly quotes, dashes or letters with diacritical marks, please take a moment to open Windows' Notepad accessory and paste your text there before copying it into our form. Not all browsers read quote and dash characters the same way, and results can be unpredictable if you don't pre-process them. You can also tell Word to save a copy of your document as plain text and work from that.
  
  
• Finally: We reserve the right to reject or edit submissions on grounds of taste.

Some preferences

• Time: We prefer to show the actual start time of a concert or show rather than a "doors open" time.
  
  
• Date: You can save a few keystrokes here. You do not need to type a day of the week in the date space. The database will store only the date, and it always calculates the weekday as needed. If the weekday is the wrong one for the date, the date takes priority.
  
  
• More about dates:
  • In the date box, please type times on the same line as dates and let them automatically wrap in the date box if they need to.
  • For best results, type the date first. "5/25/2009" is a good format.
  • Please type "at" or "from" between the date and the time, as in "5/25/09 at 5 p.m."
  • You don't have to type every date individually. The date space can understand phrases such as "Every Tuesday until Dec. 23 at 5 p.m." and "First Wednesday of the month until October 1 at noon." The "until" phrase is required in this usage.
    
    
• Date tip: After you type a time and date, click in some other space and watch a calendar appear to see if the software is interpreting your entry correctly. The most common problem is that the time does not appear.
  
  
• Prices: Many events have complex pricing for advance sales, different ages, members, canned goods and so on. For print, we reduce these to a price range, lowest first. It helps us if you put a price range in the price space and put the full explanation into the description field, where it will all be available online.
  
  
• Comments: At present comments appear only in print.

More help

If you get stuck, e-mail myevent@plaind.com with Help in the subject line. Someone at The Plain Dealer will contact you as soon as possible.