Customizing Your Work Area
by Kathie Porter

Advantage uses a variety of methods to provide you with a customized work area. One method of customization is the VIEW – Preferences listing on the Advantage tool bar.

In addition to modifying your color choices (on the Colors tab), the display tab allows you to control how information is presented to you in Advantage.

The check boxes for Display Data Trees and Display Splash Screens are easily understood; a check in front of one of these means to show the data tree or that initial splash screen.

The Display Report Completion messages can be unchecked, which will stop Advantage from notifying you that your report is ready to view.

The Show Help "Always On Top" is a little understood line. This controls the behavior of the Advantage on-line help.

When this box is checked, the Advantage help will pop up (when invoked), and you will be unable to toggle back to Advantage. With this box UN-checked, the Help will pop up, and you can toggle between the Help and Advantage. Users with dual screens can actually park the Help on the second screen, and easily cross check between Advantage and the Help. This toggling methodology can be very useful if you are exploring new functionality.

Show Field Descriptions enables those large, square field description boxes that show up when you hover over the field. If these are getting in the way, you can easily turn them off by un-checking this box.

Under the Editing Tab - there are two boxes worthy of interest: Gray Disabled Field Captions and Gray Disabled Field Values.

Although these follow the Microsoft "norm," I find that it is more useful to UNcheck these two boxes. They affect the prompt and the values when you Inquire on a record (launching a dialog box). If you need to do a screen capture of the image, or you are displaying the dialog box on an overhead, Unchecking these boxes will allow you to see the prompts and the field values much more easily.

This technical tip was provided by Advantage product guru, Kathie Porter. You can contact Kathie at kport@advantagecs.com.