Appendix A
	Quick Start

This appendix is for impatient people who don't want to read a whole manual or work through a set of tutorials before getting to work. It's a terse summary of Concurrence's concepts and commands, and relies on your familiarity with typical NeXTstep programs. If there are words or terms presented here with which you are unfamiliar, please refer to the glossary.

To make the most of Concurrence, you should understand three things:

· Outlines

· Slide shows

· Multiple views

Outlines

An outline is a hierarchical collection of topics. A topic is a piece of text, usually one or two sentences.

A topic can have subtopics, or children. Children are indented below their parent topic. A topic and its children are treated as a unit: if you move a topic, its children move with it. If you copy and paste a topic, its children are copied and pasted too.
				
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	Creating topics

Press the Return key to create a new topic, below the first selected, or target topic.

	Selecting topics

Click a topic's handle to select it. Shift-click more handles to add to the selection.

Click on the white background of an outline view and drag. A selection marquee will follow the mouse, selecting any topic it touches.

Look at the Select submenu of the Edit menu for the usual Select All command and interesting variations upon it.

	Entering Text

To enter text into the target topic (the first selected one), just type. To begin typing at a particular point in a topic's text, click and edit as usual. 

Hitting the enter key will terminate topic editing, and leave the current topic selected.

	Coloring Text

Concurrence allows you to set the color of selected text. Raise the Font panel, and notice that it features a color well.

	Promoting or Demoting Topics

Pressing the Tab key will demote a topic (cause it to appear indented to the right). Pressing Shift-Tab will promote it (cause it to appear progressively outdented to the left). To use real tabs in a topic's text, type Alt-Tab.

	Expanding or Collapsing Topics

A topic can be collapsed to hide its children by double-clicking its handle. Note that collapsed topics exhibit a different handle (pictured). 

Double-clicking the handle of a collapsed topic will expand it again.

	Repositioning Topics

To reposition a topic, click and drag its handle. You'll see the topic you drag (and its descendants) "pull out" of the outline view. Move the topic to the desired location (as indicated by the destination marker, pictured here) and release the mouse.
				
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	Default Formats

Text format changes (font, color, justification) applied to a selected topic (rather than a text selection within the topic) will set the default format for that level. The change thus applies to all peers of the selected topic; that is, to all topics at the same level.

When you create new topics at the affected level, their text will adopt the default format. Similarly, topics moved into this level will be converted to the default format. When conversion happens, Concurrence tries to preserve stylistic attributes, like italicization and size.

This is hard to explain, but easy to see. Create an outline, choose a topic (remember, select its handle, not its text), and choose Bold or Italic. Notice that the topic's peers change too. Promote and demote a topic at this level, and see what happens.

	Topic Labels

Label styles (e.g., Harvard, Legal) can be set on a level by level basis. Choose Show Ruler from the Format menu, select a topic (and thus its level), and choose the desired label style from the pop-up button on the ruler.

All topics on a particular level of an outline must have the same label style.

	Attaching Files to Topics

Drag a file from the Workspace to an outline view to attach it to the target topic. The file's icon will be displayed in the topic, where it may be opened by double-clicking, or dragged again to other locations. Attachments are explained in depth in Chapter 13.

Slide Views

A slide view is another way to view the hierarchical topics of an outline. Any topic of an outline can be the title of a slide, with its subtopics making up the slide's body. The subtopics in turn can be the titles of subslides, and so on.

A slide view has three parts-a master sorter, a slide sorter, and a slide pane.
			
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	Creating and Arranging Slides

Click a minislide in a slide sorter to select it, and press the Return key. Just as with topics in an outline, a new slide is created beneath the one you selected.

Also like topics, slides can be expanded and collapsed, promoted and demoted, and dragged from place to place in the sorter.

	Entering Text

By default, a slide features two boxes, its title box, and its body box. These are called outline boxes, because the text they display are topics in the same outline, and can be treated as such. You can expand and collapse these topics, set their default formats, move them, etc. 

Select a slide's title box (the wide short one on top) and type. Now select the same slide's body box and type again. The body text is a subtopic of the title text.

If you expand the slide you're working with by double-clicking it in the slide sorter, and then select the first slide that is exposed, you'll see its title is the text you entered in the body box. Edit the title, and the text in the body box changes too.

	Adding Graphics

To add graphical symbols to a slide, click the Palette button  ¬at the top left of the slide pane. 

The Palette appears, a wide window with eight wells. Drag items from the Palette into your slide. 

EPS, TIFF and Adobe Illustrator files can be dragged from the Workspace into your slides as well. By default, they will be copied into your document, though they can be referenced instead. For more on using other files with Concurrence documents, read Chapter 13, Attachments.

	Inspecting

Slides and the items on them can be investigated with the Inspector panel (raised by clicking the Inspector button ¬ at the top left of the slide pane). 

The panel's contents vary, to reflect the properties of the object you have selected.

Use the Inspector to (among other things) change the size of symbols and attachments, to control how slides will be played in a slide show (more on this below), and to change the colors of symbols, slides and outline boxes.

	Customizing Your Palette

You can inspect and customize the objects on the Palette. Click an object on the palette, but don't drag. It will be highlighted in white, and its attributes will be shown in the inspector.

	Master Slides

Every slide in a slide sorter follows a master slide. Objects on its master are visible on a slide, but are locked. These locked items follow changes made to them on the master.

For example, if you want your company logo to appear in the corner of all slides, drag it into the master slide. It appears everywhere.

As  another example, suppose you want the titles of your slides to be in a 48 point font. Select the title text on the master slide, and use the Font panel to set its size. The titles throughout the slide view will change.

If you unlock one of these master-supplied objects to modify it directly, it will stop tracking changes made to its master. However, other objects will continue to track.

	Creating New Master Slides

You can have any number of master slides in a slide view. To create a new one, select a mini-slide in the master sorter and press the Return key.

To duplicate an existing master, select it and choose Duplicate from the Edit menu. Copy and Paste work as well.

	Setting or Resetting a Slide's Master

To assign a different master to a slide, or to resync it with its current master, use the Set Master button.

Select the slide, then select the desired master, and click the Set Master button. Objects from the slide's previous master are removed, and it is made to adopt the appearance of its new master.

	Playing a Slide Show

Click the Play button ¬ at the bottom right of a slide view to see its slides displayed one by one.

You can inspect slides to set things like the effect used to segue between them, and how long they are shown. 

Use the Play panel to control other aspects of the show, such as whether the slide show takes over the entire computer screen. Raise the panel by choosing Play from the Tools menu, or by Command-clicking the slide view's Play button.

Multiple views

One Concurrence document can be displayed in a number of ways, with any number of outline and slide views. These views will share the same text and the same structure. That is, if the first topic of one outline view says "Able Baker Charlie," the first topic of every other outline view will say it as well. And the first slides of all that document's slide views will feature the title "Able Baker Charlie." If you edit that text in any one place, you will see it changing in all the other views.

The formats of different views are completely independent, however. The same topic can be shown in different fonts in different outlines. It can serve as the titles of slides of different shapes and sizes, featuring different symbols.

A document's views are summarized in its view browser.

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