Federation Secretary’s System
Version 5
An East Coast
Software Product
Software License and Warranty
The software, which accompanies this license, is the property of East Coast Software and is protected by copyright law.
You may:
(1) use one copy of the software on a single computer;
(2) make one copy of the software for archival purposes or copy the software onto the hard disk of your computer and retain the original for archival purposes;
(3) transfer the software on a permanent basis to another person, provided that you retain no copies of the software and the transferee agrees to the terms of this license.
You may not:
(1) copy the documentation which accompanies the software;
(2) sublicense, rent or lease any portion of the software;
(3) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble , modify, or make any attempt to discover the source code of the software.
Limited Warranty:
East Coast Software warrants that the media on which the software is distributed will be free from defects for a period of thirty days from the date of delivery of the software to you. Your sole remedy in the event of a breech of this warranty will be that East Coast Software will, at its option, replace any defective media returned to East Coast Software within the warranty period or refund the money you paid for the software. East Coast Software does not warrant that the software will meet your requirements or that operation of the software will be uninterrupted or that the software will be error-free.
Disclaimer of damages:
East Coast Software will not be liable for any
consequential losses, including lost profits or lost data arising out of the
use or inability to use the software. In no case will East Coast Software’s
liability exceed the purchase price of the software.
Contents
Liberation points/Race start points.
The effect of ETS on the members’ form
Set and choose the number of nominated birds
Printing Winners’ Certificates
Great Circle Distance Calculator
Thank you for buying the Federation Secretary’s System from East Coast Software.
Some general information
The minimum hardware required is a Pentium with Windows W95, 16MB RAM, 8MB disc space and a compatible printer. This is a minimum requirement and the application will work but only slowly with this configuration. Windows XP running in at least 256MB RAM will be much faster.
When you are asked to “Click” on something, it means, put the mouse pointer on to the object to click on and click the left mouse button. You may be asked at times to “Right Click”, it is as above but now click with the right mouse button instead of the left one.
There is a lot of help for when you are not certain what to do. When in any form, if you press the F1 on your keyboard, you will get context-sensitive help, i.e. help about the form you are in. You can also browse the help system by choosing Help, Contents. Besides this, there is an on-disk manual that you can open and read. To access this, click on the Windows Start button, All Programs, FSS and a sub-menu will open. One of the items in this sub-menu is the on-disk manual.
Before
starting
Before installing the Federation Secretary’s System (FSS5), make sure that your screen is configured to at least 800 by 600. How? With nothing running on your computer, right click on the background screen (not on an icon). Then click on Properties. This will open a window with several tabs. Click on the tab labelled, Settings. In the resulting window, find Desktop Area and if it says 640 by 480, move the slider to the right until it says 800 by 600. If it is already at 800 by 600 or greater, do nothing; just shut the window down by clicking Cancel. If you have altered the setting click Apply then OK. Even larger numbers will give you a larger work area, as all forms will be smaller.
Installing
FSS
Put the CD in your drive and wait several seconds. It should start up and install itself. If it fails to do this, click on Start then Run and type D:SETUP in the box provided (assuming your CD drive letter is D, if not, substitute the drive letter for D). Click OK.
As the installation starts up, you will be shown a form where you can choose where to install the system. If you have only one hard disk (C:) then just accept the defaults. If you have partitioned your hard disk or have more than one hard disk, you may want to install it on a disk other than C:. This is the place to choose. It is recommended that you leave the directory or folder (the bit after C:\) at the default (Program Files\East Coast Software\FSS).
Uninstalling
This software can be removed from your computer using the standard windows ‘Add/Remove Software’ feature. To do this click Start, Control Panel, double-click on the icon for Add/Remove Programs and find the FSS in the list. Click on this to highlight it and then click the Add/Remove pushbutton.
As an alternative, an easier way is to click Start, All Programs, FSS, Uninstaller to start the process.
Multiple forms
In this version of FSS you can open as many
forms at once as you need. The second form to be opened will be situated just
below and to the right of the first one. Grab the title bar – the thick blue
area at the top of the form – and drag it to where is most convenient to you.
When you have many forms open, one may be hidden behind others. If you can see
any part of the form you want, simply click on it and that will “give the form
focus” and bring it to the front. Another way, particularly useful if you
cannot see any part of the form, is to click on the Window menu item and click
on the form name there. That will give the form focus and bring it to the
front. For a quick way to close all forms when you have many open, click on
Window then Close All.
Getting Started
When you first start FSS, it has no data in it. It makes no sense to try to enter races and results until you have members and their race start points. You are in for a great deal of work to enter these.
The starting screen for the FSS has, across the top, several menu words. Initially some will be inaccessible and lead you to what is required. They start with ‘File’ and end with ‘Help’. The first thing to do is to choose the start points/liberation sites that you intend to use.
If it is used as a federation system rather than a club system, add the names of the member clubs in the federation. If you are using the system for a club rather than a federation, you must add the name of your club under Maintenance, Clubs.
You must have both race start point names and clubs entered before you can access Maintenance, Members.
You must have both race start point names and have defined at least one pool under Maintenance, Pools before you can add races. If you do not use pools, just add a penny pool and do not use it.
You cannot edit or delete a race until you have defined a race.
You must have at least one race defined and have members and their start point distances entered before you can add results.
Previewing printouts
When selecting the report pushbutton on most forms you have the option to preview the report before printing. This is the normal way to use the system. If the ‘Preview’ tick box is selected then a preview will be generated when you click the ‘OK’ pushbutton. You should have selected the printer you wish to print to. If you have selected the ‘Generic Text only’ printer your display may have a number of lines of text on top of one another. If this happens close the preview and select the printer you have installed with your computer and which you wish to print to.
If you wish to print more than one copy of this report you can either do this from the print options page or when selecting the print icon from the preview page the spin box for number of copies will be active.
Liberation points/Race start points.
Click on Maintenance then Choose Liberation Sites. This will give you lists from which you can choose. At the top of the form there is a drop-down list where you can choose which Union’s sites you require. You may only want to choose sites from, say, RPRA official sites. Drop the list and click on the Union. You may choose lib sites from as many Unions as you want but bear in mind that ALL selected sites, including any duplicated sites, will appear on the second page of the member’s form where his/he