How to Create Intersample Custom Fields with a Summary Function - Tip94

OBJECTIVE or GOAL

Welcome back to Get Empowered! In the last Empower tip-of-the-week post for Empower Chromatography Data Software, we learned how to create an Intersample Custom Field (Tip #93).

This week we will continue with our series on Custom Fields and learn how to create an Intersample Custom Field with a summary function (Part 12).

Creating Custom Fields in Empower:

• #82: The basic steps on creating a Custom Field
• #83: How to create a Custom Sample Set Field
• #84: How to create a Component Custom Field
• #85: How to create a Peak Custom Field
• #86: How to copy a Custom Field from one project to another
• #87: How to modify a Custom Field
• #88: How to create a Result Custom Field
• #89: How to modify a Custom Field that applies to specific samples and/or specific peaks
• #90: How to use Empower to evaluate whether the sample meets specific criteria
• #92: How to create one custom field to determine a sample pass/fail
• #93: How to create an Intersample Custom Field

This week, we will create an Intersample Custom Field with a summary function, such as average or %RSD, and learn how Empower Software calculates the average area or the %RSD of the area (i.e., for a peak of interest over multiple samples).

Q: Why create a Custom Field when a simple summary report will provide those values?

A: When we view the average or %RSD in a summary report, we only see those values in either the Print Preview screen or if we save the report as a PDF. The result of the Custom Field is stored and we can use those values for further calculations like a pass/fail.

Let’s get started.

ENVIRONMENT

• Empower

PROCEDURE

1. The syntax for Intersample calculations is seen below. The difference is the addition of the summary function.

2. We can take advantage of some “shortcuts” in this Custom Field. For example, we can use the % symbol to replace multiple characters in the sample labels and/or use it to tell Empower to use ‘all of the injections’ in the calculation.

3. Whenever we use a summary function, we need to add one final line to our Sample Set Method, which is Summarize Custom Fields.

4. The result: the %RSD for the retention time of our peak is 0.234%.

5. For purpose of comparison: view the summary report showing the same information.

It’s that easy!

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

• See Tip#90 to learn how to create a custom field for pass/fail evaluation.
• This procedure can be followed using the QuickStart or Pro interface.