Head Office is designed to use preformated weekly stat files that are downloaded from Quick Stats Service. The reason I chose to do this was made rather obvious after the first week of trying to do manual entry. I spent almost 4 hours updating stats, only to find that I made several mistakes and have to spend another hour fixing them and re-generating the reports.
After pricing out several services and making sure the companies were going to be in business longer than it took to write the software, I settled on Quick Stats. To date, their stat files have no caused any problems (I’ve been using them for four years now) and they have provided help whenever the occassion has arose.
Quick Stats supplies the files in either TEXT or .ZIP format. I normally use White Knight to download the files from Quick Stats BBS, but now that they are available on the Internet, you can grab their files that way as well.
Files in TEXT format are separate so you have to download the pitchers and then the hitters files each week. If you have StuffIt Deluxe from Alladin Systems with all the translators, it will handle the ZIP format perfectly for you. The advantage of the ZIP format is that it contains both stat files, position eligibility and even some weekly news about the league (in the real world).
So while you can do manual entry with Head Office, I can not stress enough that unless you have an inifinite amount of time and truly love typing in all those little numbers, you’re probably wasting your energies.
QUICK START
Okay so you don’t like to read manuals. We’re even, I don’t like writing them.
However, in this case I would suggest you at least read portions of the manual to get an idea of how Head Office works. The section of the manual that explains what all of the files do for a start.
Most of the files that are used by Head Office are plain text files, like the ones we get from Quick Stats. Only the League and Baseball.HO files are unique to Head Office. While you can open most of other files with any word processor, if you do make any modifications, save them as PLAIN TEXT or ASCII. Head Office uses files that have no formatting, font sizes or anything that a regular Macintosh document would. The files are just text and spaces to seperate the fields.
Things to try :
Report Generation :
Double Click Head Office
Open “The Other League” (Fantasy) or “Magic Seven” (Pool)
Select Page Setup from the File Menu (if you are in Fantasy)
Click on the Report Button on the Navigator window
Fantasy will print out a pool report
Pool will create a disk file.
Updating Stats :
Click on the Update Player Stats button in the Navigator
Select either 071496.HLP or 071496.HLH (one is pitchers, one is hitters)
Sit back for 30 seconds and watch a whole weeks update take place.
Print another report if you like.
Editing Player Stats :
Click on the Edit Player Stats button.
Change any info you want (top cells are YTD bottom are weekly). Update.
Player Transactions :
Click on the Player Tranacts button.
Select a Team using the popup menu
Select a player and the function you want to apply to them.
Print another report if you want.
Now when you have finished all that, it’s time to refill the coffee cup and sit back and read the Head Office manual. It will explain in detail how Head Office works and how you can get the most from it.
And most of all, I sincerely hope you enjoy using Head Office.
