When you begin using this CD-ROM you are presented with the Options screen. From here you can go to the Introduction, to the Contents Grid or to this Help window.
The Introduction puts today's environmental problems into perspective: it briefly traces our planet's 4.6-billion-year history in sound and pictures, and shows how the many threats to the ecology of Planet Earth have all come about in an amazingly short time.
The Contents Grid contains most of the material on the CD-ROM. The grid is divided from top to bottom into eight rows - one for each subject. Seven time periods are represented from left to right.
Yellow and red dots scattered over the grid show the distribution of articles and photographs, according to which subject they belong to and which year they come from. This means there are two possible ways to search for material.
Either 1. Click in a box to zoom in on a time-period within one subject, and view articles as they appear by date.
Or 2. Choose a subject from the eight picture panels on the left. Then use Section menus and Topic menus to find a list of articles related to your chosen Topic. These articles may span several years.
Headlines of articles are displayed in scrolling list windows. To read the full article, click on the headline and the text is displayed in the separate article window. Some headlines also appear as part of the background image of each rectangular box in the grid. Clicking on one of these headlines will also open the article.
Within boxes in the grid there are 'thumbnail' (miniature) versions of photographs. Click on the thumbnail images to display the full-sized photograph.
Some images - such as diagrams, illustrations and maps - are linked to particular articles. This is indicated by a symbol (>>) at the end of the article's headline. When you open the article, you will see the 'Linked image' icon at the top of its window: click on this icon to display the linked image in the image window.
There is one other way of looking for articles - by using the Keywords search from the Windows menu. (See 'Keywords' in this Help section for more information.)
You can also print articles and images from this CD-ROM (see 'Print'), save material on your hard disk or a floppy disk (see 'Copy to disk') and make notes in your personal on-screen Notepad while you are using the CD-ROM (see 'Notepad').
