The Shopping List Viewer is the heart of the Shopping Helper's features. This allows you to compare and track a set of products from a set of stores. You can access the viewer by these methods:
The price grid shows all the prices for the given set of products and set of stores defined for the shopping list being viewed. Use the tabs to select other shopping lists and use the 'Find More Stores' button to add and remove stores form this list using the Store Selector.
The first time you view a shopping list in the Shopping List Viewer, it will automatically create a set of stores for this shopping list. It uses information about how the products were added to the list as well as looking at your lists of Favorite Stores to help build the initial list stores. After this initial automatic creation, you can manage the list using the Store Selector.
There are a few events that can lead to stores being automatically added to a shopping list:
The first column on the left shows each product in the shopping list as well as some summary information from the grid prices, such as the number of stores selling the product and the minimum price. For products that are also sold by stores not included in the grid, it will also show summary information from across all stores. The summary at the top of this column shows the minimum total cost to purchase all the products in the shopping list, at least for those that are available from at least one of the stores. The numbers in parentheses show how many of the products are available and the total number in the list.
The first row across the top shows the current set of stores defined for this shopping list. There is also summary information indicating the number of products in the list this store currently sells, as well as the total cost for all those products.
Within the grid, the prices are shown, where the lowest price for each product is highlighted. Also highlighted are prices for products currently not in stock at that store. In this case, the price reflects the last known price for that product at that store.
Here is the list of items in the Shopping List Viewer which are links:
If the Shopping List Viewer remains open, and new products or stores are added, or if the prices are refreshed, the window will not reflect these changes. The 'Refresh' button at the bottom of the window will force a refresh to get the most recent data.