Multi-user Guide situation

Bill J Gray Feb 16, 2003

Dear Ove,

BTW, my mailing address, pluto@..., is
indeed still on the Web site (click on the "Contact Info" item in
the main grid, fifth item down in the leftmost column.)

I can think of a couple of ways of handling multiple users.

One is the method Sandy McNamara suggested: have each
person use File... Save a Mark to store their current settings. As
Sandy mentioned, this doesn't catch absolutely everything; the
currently-selected user-added datasets and overlays don't go into
the Mark files. But just about everything else does, and that may
be enough to get things going.

I've just fixed the problem Sandy mentioned: if you enter the name
of an existing Mark file, Guide will ask you if you want to replace it.
Can't post it quite yet, unfortunately... got some "fixes" to make.

Another method, if you've got a bit more disk space, would be to
install Guide in multiple directories, such as c:\guide_user_a,
c:\guide_user_b, and so on, each time installed from the same
network drive. Each time, a new icon would be created on the
desktop, and the users would do well to right-click on the icons
and change their names to something intelligible to them.

Only problem with this is that each Guide installation is going to
soak up about 10 MBytes or so (varies quite a bit, because some
files get copied over on an "as-needed" basis, but that's a good
ballpark estimate.)

"...The school could buy a copy of version 8 if it works better!"
(Grin) Well, of course it _does_ work _much_ better in many
ways. I can't really claim that this is one of them.

-- Bill