Black Box 4

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Black Box 4 / BlackBox.cdr / genapps / hp22dc.arj / USRGUIDE / PLANNER.TXT < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1991-05-16 | 21KB | 490 lines

________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 135 ________________________________________________________________________ CHAPTER 8: THE DAILY PLANNER PAD Do you have an untidy collection of reminders stuffed into your daily planner because it just doesn't provide enough room to write decent-size notes? Do you accumulate next year's appointments on assorted slips of paper at the back of your current planner because it makes no provision for future years? Do you waste precious time rummaging through your planner in search of an appointment or note that you know is in there somewhere--if only you could track it down? Or have you given up on planners entirely because they're just too much bother? Well, HyperPAD's Daily Planner pad lets you say good-bye to planner hassles! In this chapter, you'll learn how to: 0 Go straight to the Daily Planner page for a desired date--days, months, or years from now. 0 Zero in on the Daily Planner page bearing a specified appointment, even if you haven't the vaguest idea of its date. 0 Enter a reminder or a long note for a particular time or leave a note applicable to an entire day. 0 Free up disk space by deleting appointments prior to a date you specify. 0 Print out the information in your Daily Planner pad (including reminders, long notes, and Notes for the day), not only for a single day but for a whole month. You'll catch on to the procedures in this chapter much faster (and have a lot more fun learning this pad!) if you bring the Daily Planner up on your system and play with its features as you read about them. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 136 ________________________________________________________________________ GOING TO A DATE At first glance, HyperPAD's Daily Planner pad, shown here, resembles a conventional printed planner. But as you're about to learn, there's a lot more here than meets the eye! ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ **** The Printed Documentation has a picture or screen shot here **** │ │ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ In order to get the most out of the Daily Planner pad, you'll need to acquire some navigational skills--so you can go directly to the day, month, and year where you want to enter information and then find information again once you've entered it. MOVING TO ANOTHER DAY When you first open the Daily Planner pad, HyperPAD displays the page for the date you were last working with. To bring up the page for the current date, just select Today (ALT+4) from the command line. To move forward or backward one day at a time through the Daily Planner, use the Day buttons in the lower right corner of the screen or just press the PGUP and PGDN keys. But if you need to travel very far within the Daily Planner, the day-at- a-time method can get pretty cumbersome, so let's see how to move through the Planner in larger increments. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 137 ________________________________________________________________________ MOVING TO ANOTHER MONTH There are two ways to move between months. The first is to use the Month buttons in the lower left corner of the Daily Planner screen, which take you to the first day of the preceding or following months. Once you arrive at the desired month, you can use the Day buttons to reach the day you're after within that month. The second method achieves the same effect but requires a bit less work. To move to another month and day with the Monthly Planner: 1. Select Monthly (ALT+2) from the Daily Planner's command line. A Monthly Planner page (like the one illustrated here) appears showing the month you were on in the Daily Planner. ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ **** The Printed Documentation has a picture or screen shot here **** │ │ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ 2. To move from month to month, use the paging buttons or the PGUP and PGDN keys. Note: Selecting This Month (ALT+3) from the Monthly Planner's command line displays the current month. 3. To select the day you're after once you reach the desired month: With the keyboard: Press the arrow keys until the day is highlighted and then press ENTER. With the mouse: Place the mouse pointer on the day and click the left mouse button. The Daily Planner reappears, showing your newly selected date. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 138 ________________________________________________________________________ Tip: If you're in the Daily Planner and realize it would require a lot of PGUP or PGDN keypresses or mouse clicks to get to a particular day within the same month (e.g., you want to move from June 4 to June 30), you can reach your target more quickly by calling up the Monthly Planner (ALT+2) and just selecting the desired day as indicated above. MOVING TO ANOTHER YEAR There are two ways to move between years. The first is to use the Year buttons in the lower left corner of the Daily Planner screen, which take you to the preceding or following years. Once you arrive at the desired year, you can use the Month buttons to reach the month you're after within that year, after which you can use the Day buttons to reach the day you're after within that month. However, the preceding method can require a lot of keypresses or mouse clicks, so let's look at a more direct approach. To move to another year and month with the Yearly Planner: 1. Select Yearly (ALT+3) from the Daily Planner's command line. A Yearly Planner page (like the one illustrated here) appears showing the year you were on in the Daily Planner. ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ **** The Printed Documentation has a picture or screen shot here **** │ │ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 139 ________________________________________________________________________ 2. To move from year to year, use the paging buttons or press the PGUP and PGDN keys. To proceed directly to a particular year, select Go to Year (ALT+1) from the command line, type the desired year in the text box, and press ENTER. Note: Selecting This Year (ALT+2) from the Yearly Planner's command line displays the current year. 3. To select the month you're after once you reach the desired year: With the keyboard: Press the arrow keys until the month is highlighted and then press ENTER. With the mouse: Place the mouse pointer on the month and click the left mouse button. The Monthly Planner for that month appears. 4. Select the day you're after from the Monthly Planner as indicated earlier. Tip: If you're in the Monthly Planner and realize it would require quite a few PGUP or PGDN keypresses or mouse clicks to get to a particular month within the same year (e.g., you want to move from June to November), you can reach your target more quickly by calling up the Yearly Planner (ALT+2) and just selecting the desired month as indicated above. FINDING INFORMATION Let's say that ten days ago you scheduled a meeting with Betty Robinson, a prospective out-of-town client, for around the end of next month and recorded both the appointment and her phone number in your Daily Planner. You've just discovered that (1) you need to phone Ms. Robinson, (2) you can't locate her phone number anywhere else, and (3) you've forgotten the meeting's date so you don't know which Daily Planner page you recorded the phone number on. In short, the classic needle-in-a- haystack challenge! Does this mean you should take your best guess at the meeting's date, bring up that page in your Daily Planner, and then press PGDN repeatedly, scanning your appointments and notes for each succeeding day until you hit pay dirt? Not at all! Here's how to go directly to the Daily Planner page on which "Betty Robinson" (or any other word or phrase) appears. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 140 ________________________________________________________________________ To move to a Daily Planner page containing specified information: 1. Select Find (ALT+6) from the Daily Planner's command line. 2. Type the desired text into the dialog box that appears. 3. Press ENTER. The text box disappears, and HyperPAD highlights the first place where it finds the specified word or phrase in the appointments list or Notes for the day. 4. To find the next instance of the same word or phrase (if the first occurrence isn't the one you're after), press ENTER again. HyperPAD highlights the next place (either on the same page or on another page) where it finds the specified word or phrase in the appointments list or Notes for the day. 5. Keep pressing ENTER to move from one instance of the specified word or phrase to the next, until you arrive at the desired material. The above procedure should have taken you straight to the Daily Planner page showing the appointment and Betty Robinson's phone number. Occasionally, though, you may have to put a little thought into tracking down information. Suppose, for instance, that you type Betty Robinson into the dialog box and get the message "Can't find text" rather than the desired Planner page. Try typing in a smaller segment of the word or phrase you're after--perhaps just Robinson. You might come up with a Daily Planner page showing the appointment "Mtg. with Elizabeth [not "Betty"!] Robinson -- (212) 675-4912." MAKING APPOINTMENTS In the appointments column on the left side of the Daily Planner, you can enter both a reminder and a long note for each hour and half-hour listed. Just follow the instructions in the next two subsections. ENTERING REMINDERS A reminder is a note (usually short) that can be displayed on the appointments list, to the right of the time to which it pertains. Here's how to enter a reminder: ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 141 ________________________________________________________________________ To enter a reminder for a particular time: 1. To select the desired time: With the keyboard: Press TAB or the arrow keys until the highlight enters the appointments column, press the up and down arrow keys until the time you want is highlighted, and then press ENTER. With the mouse: Point to the time you want and double-click the left mouse button. A dialog box appears showing the options <<Reminder>>, <Long Note>, and <Cancel>. 2. Select <<Reminder>> from the dialog box. 3. Type the reminder into the dialog box that appears and press ENTER. The dialog box closes, and your reminder appears in the appointments column to the right of the selected time. You can type a reminder that's quite a bit longer than the width of the reminders area on the appointments list. However, if you do type a reminder note that exceeds the width of the reminders area, only the first portion of your reminder will be visible. To see the entire reminder, you'll have to bring up the text box again and move through the reminder with the left and right arrow keys. ENTERING LONG NOTES As its name implies, a long note is a note that's too long to be displayed on the appointments list. Instead, when you use the procedure below to enter a long note for a particular time, a check mark appears on the appointments list to the left of the time to which the long note pertains. The check mark is simply your tip-off that a long note is present. To enter a long note for a particular time: 1. Select the desired time, as indicated above. 2. When the dialog box appears showing the options <<Reminder>>, <Long Note>, and <Cancel>, select <Long Note>. A scrollable field appears, headed with the selected time and date. 3. Type your note into the scrollable field. 4. When you've finished typing, press ESC to return. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 142 ________________________________________________________________________ A check mark now appears beside the time to which your long note pertains. Whenever you need to review or modify your long note, just use the above procedure to display it again. You should be aware that the command line's Find command (ALT+6) searches only reminders and Notes for the Day, not long notes. Therefore, if you've left some vital information in a long note that you think you might later want to track down, it's always a good idea to put a keyword in the reminders area that you can use to zero in on the material in your long notes. For example, suppose that for a particular time a few weeks from now you have the reminder Staff Mtg. accompanied by a long note that lists safety concerns you want to raise, since this staff meeting will deal with workplace safety. However, this Staff Mtg. reminder looks no different from all the other reminders about your weekly staff meetings, so you might have a hard time finding the list of safety concerns in order to expand on it. But if you enter a more descriptive reminder (e.g., Staff Mtg.--safety) you can use the Find command to access the reminder and then call up the long note for that time. USING THE NOTES FOR THE DAY FIELD To enter the Notes for the day field, press TAB or place the cursor in the field with the mouse. Since this field is scrollable, you can type extensive notes into it and then use the keyboard or the mouse to move through your notes and bring portions of them into view in the field. DELETING OUTDATED INFORMATION From time to time, you'll probably want to delete old reminders, long notes, and Notes for the day from your Daily Planner, just to free up the disk space they occupy, thereby improving the performance of the Daily Planner pad. To remove outdated material, select Delete Old (ALT+5) from the Daily Planner's command line. The text box that appears can be used to delete all Daily Planner notations prior to a specified date. By default, yesterday's date is already displayed in the text box, but you can use the BACKSPACE key to remove the default date and type in a date of your choice. Once you press ENTER or select <<Ok>>, the old information is removed from the Planner. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 143 ________________________________________________________________________ PRINTING In this section, you'll learn how to get a hard copy of your reminders, Notes for the day, and long notes for the currently viewed day or month. If you haven't printed before, you should start by checking to see whether HyperPAD has the correct setup information for your printer. If you have printed before, HyperPAD will remember the settings you selected last time, so you can skip this procedure unless you need to change any of the settings. To check your printer setup: 1. Select the Printer Setup command from the File menu (ALT+F, U). The Printer Setup dialog box appears. 2. If the printer you're using isn't specified correctly after "Current printer," select the name of your printer from the Available printers list box. Note: If the name of your printer doesn't appear in the list box, select Generic Line Printer. 3. If necessary, change the setting in the Print to column. 4. When you're finished changing the settings, press ENTER or select <<Ok>> to close the dialog box. Use the following procedure to print out one day's worth of Daily Planner information. To print a Daily Planner page for a particular day: 1. Using the procedures described earlier in this chapter, go to the page whose material you want to print out. 2. Select Print (ALT+1) from the command line. HyperPAD automatically prints out the desired material. If you're going to be traveling and won't have access to your computer, you might want a hard copy of your Daily Planner pages for a whole month. Of course, you could accomplish this by checking through the Daily Planner pages for the month in question and printing out each page on which you find information entered. But HyperPAD also offers the following method, which is much faster. ________________________________________________________________________ Chapter 8 The Daily Planner Pad 144 ________________________________________________________________________ To print the Daily Planner pages for a particular month: 1. Using the procedures described earlier in this chapter, go to the Monthly Planner page for the month whose material you want to print out. 2. Select Print (ALT+1) from the command line. A dialog box appears asking you to confirm that you want to print the Daily Planner pages for that month. When you reply affirmatively, HyperPAD automatically searches through the Daily Planner for the currently viewed month and prints out only the pages on which you've entered information. CONCLUSION Now that you've finished this chapter, you should know how to move through the Daily Planner using the Day, Month, and Year buttons as well as how to use the Monthly Planner and the Yearly Planner to help you navigate within the Daily Planner. And you'll be able to use the Daily Planner's Find command to go directly to the page containing reminder material. Once you reach the desired date, you'll know not only how to enter reminders, long notes, and Notes for the day but how to delete this material once it has outlived its usefulness. And you'll be able to obtain a hard copy of your Daily Planner information for the day or month of your choice. In short, you'll be able to increase your productivity by using the Daily Planner as a valuable scheduling aid!