You may want to do some operations on several writings at a time, such as hiding parts of a writing that are not needed (e.g. ingress), replacing odd-looking quotes with more common ones, or styling multiple writings to look similar. Doing these things one by one would be quite a clunky job. Other benefits include the ability to see the dates of all the writings in a work at once, and if needed, change them. From the image you might guess that changes can only be made to a collection of writings at a time, but it should be mentioned here that holding down the Ctrl key while selecting a collection of writings from the menu does not replace the previous listing, but adds them to the list. The header fields in the table can used for sorting in a predictable way.