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| Tips
& Techniques is intended for the user who is already familiar
with the system's overall capability and features as described in
the System Overview section and the Application and Database Guides
contained in this section. To use this section, first select the activity area and then the activity description closest to what you are seeking information about. If you do not obtain the information you are seeking here, be sure to check the System Overview or User FAQ pages or email us with your question. |
|
| Activity Areas: | |
| Organizing
Your Collection Finding Database Records Maintaining the Database Creating Reports Creating File Downloads Maintaining Your Personal Profile Setting Up Visitors to Your Collection |
|
| Organizing Your Collection | |
| Overview | |
| Our
first, and possibly most important tip in this entire section is to
PLAN before you start loading anything into the computer. TrackMyTrains.com is a flexible system that offers many options to subscribers. Take the time to fully acquaint yourself with all aspects of the system and consider what your needs and preferences are. Think through what you really want the system to do for you. This will dictate what information you need to put into the system. How much of your collection do you want to track? How much data detail do you need to satisfy your requirements? Keeping too much information is a waste of your time, but not having enough information curtails the benefits you can get. Once you have thought through what you want from the system, organize your collection so you can conveniently find items, both physically and in the system. Getting started in the right way by spending time up front planning will make a huge difference in the long-term usefulness of the system for you. Good planning allows you to efficiently maintain your information, both at the initial loading and over the years to come. Some ideas and thoughts about planning your usage follow in this section. |
|
| Anticipating your usage and data requirements | |
| Virtually
every subscriber of TrackMyTrains.com uses the system to keep track
of more expensive items to prevent the accidental purchase of duplicate
items, road numbers, and the like. This requires a minimal number
of data elements about the items being tracked. Once the information
is loaded, it can be printed or downloaded to a PDA and taken to hobby
shops, train shows, and swap meets as a conveniently organized reference
tool. There are, however, many other uses for TrackMyTrains.com. Some of these, together with their relevant data considerations, are given here. Insurance Record keeping: Purchase price, date, and where purchased information provides excellent off-site insurance records in the event of theft or fire. As many items may appreciate in value over time, it is also useful to maintain the inventory value field separately. Tracking purchases and sales for tax records: If you maintain both purchase and sales information, you can track and report what you have sold in any given time period and what gross profit may have been realized. On the purchase side, you can also maintain other costs besides the base purchase price (tax, shipping, etc.) and on the sales side you can record sales tax, if collected. Organizing physical storage of collection items: Maintaining storage locations lets you track which shelf, box or drawer you store an item in. Some users simply track items on the layout versus what is being stored off the layout while others use this capability much more extensively. For example, lists can be run to make up trains from items in storage and move them from storage to the layout and back. Generally speaking, the larger your collection is, the more useful it is to maintain this data field. The storage location field is also a good place to record items you may lend to your club or a fellow hobbyist. Maintain detailed reference information: Often information about the prototype is provided in the original packaging for a locomotive or rail car. Many hobbyists find this information interesting or useful in making up prototypical trains. It can be conveniently stored in the item notes field for later reference. Creating Wish Lists: Most collectors have long lists of items they would like to acquire when they find and / or can afford it. Many subscribers will add such items to their item databases and mark the item as a wish list item using that field in the inventory record. By setting up special sign-on identities, subscribers can share these "wish list" with potential gift buyers who can visit the website and view the wish list. Some subscribers will maintain price value information on their wish list items and print or download this information for reference when they attend shows and swap meets. Posting Items for Sale: Subscribers can mark items for sale on the inventory record and specify a desired sale price. Subscribers can create lists of "for sale" items and print or download them to other computers. Visitors authorized by the subscriber can peruse these "for sale" lists on-line at the website. Routine Maintenance Schedule Rosters: The Inventory record "Notes" field can be used for all kinds of purposes. Since records can be selected and retrieved by contents contained in fields, items can be assigned routine maintenance schedules with a little forethought. For example, locomotives could be assigned to one of several maintenance cycles, say Maintenance A, Maintenance B, etc. By putting the word string "Maintenance A" in an item's inventory notes, it and all similarly designated locomotives would be retrieved by an inquiry using the selection criterion of " 'Invty Notes' 'contains' 'Maintenance A'." Locomotives needing more frequent maintenance could be marked for multiple maintenance cycles. Special Groupings of Items: Tag word strings like "Holiday Train Car", or "Wrecking Train Car" can mark items to be selected or grouped together in special situations. Similarly, you can segregate your locomotives and rolling stock by era by placing some sort of era indicator in the Item Notes field. It is all a matter of choosing and entering unique character string tags to mark them. The Item and Inventory Notes fields are large enough to permit many tags to be placed on any item to mark it as part of a group for later retrieval. Recording DCC Addresses: TrackMyTrains.com provides an easy capability to store assigned digital command control addresses for locomotives using this technology. Simply enter 'DCC1234' (or "DCC" and whatever address) in the inventory notes field and run listings of locomotives and their DCC addresses whenever you need them. Other users have chosen to assign a catalog name of DCC and a catalog number of the address. DCC locomotives can then be selected and sorted by DCC address, if desired. If you choose this reuse of the catalog field information, we suggest using the second catalog field and reserving the first catalog field for its original purpose. Operating Session Planning: Using the item notes field, various pieces of rolling stock can be marked with a train number or other identifying information while planning for an operating session. Subsequently, reports of the cars required for the train can be produced in storage location sequence for quick and convenient assembly. When the session is over, produce a report of each train's cars sequenced by car type, railroad and road number showing the storage location and putting the cars back away into off-layout storage will be easy and accurate. TrackMyTrains.com can be very useful for those who prefer to develop an operating session plan based on car movements. By marking the records of cars that are going to be used with "from layout location / to layout location" at the beginning of the item notes field, and entering some "tag value" later in the same field, cars can be designated for the operating session. The operator then uses the system to select the cars marked for the operating session (using a selection where " 'Item Notes' 'contains' 'tag value'") and sorting the report by item notes (i.e. by the "from location"). In this way, reports can be printed showing where to put each car prior to beginning the session and where the car should be by the end of the session. These are just a few ideas about how to use TrackMyTrains.com in creative ways to organize not only your collection, but also your model railroading activities. |
|
| How much to track | |
| While
virtually all subscribers use TrackMyTrains.com to track their locomotives
and rolling stock, many also track their structures, kits, signals,
figures, special tools and the like. These are often more expensive
items they don't want to duplicate or items they simply wish to track
because of their value. Some subscribers will even track scenery and
construction materials, super detailing parts, glue, paint, and the
like. While this allows them to more easily identify inventory levels
of these items and create shopping lists, most subscribers find going
to this level is more trouble than it is worth. How much to track is a personal decision for each subscriber. The trade off is always one of benefit versus effort required. It is important to have an appropriate number of designations to separate out the various categories of things you are tracking. The table edited category field in the item record enables this high level organization of the things you are tracking. We recommend that you use this field as it was designed, even if you don't intend to track all of the various categories at this time. If you later choose to track more kinds of things, categories will help you keep these items separately organized. If you use categories at a more detailed level than it was intended, you may have a lot of work to clean it up at a later time. |
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| How much detail to keep: | |
| While
there are many data fields available in TrackMyTrains.com, we recommend
that you only maintain the ones you find useful. It is far better
to accurately maintain fewer fields than to try to maintain all fields
while taking shortcuts with accuracy. For those subscribers who already
have large collections, certain data such as purchase date, source,
or price may no longer be available on many items. We recommend defaulting
an approximate date of purchase so this field can at least indicate
that you purchased the item. An approximate purchase price is also
useful information even if you don't have the actual price paid. However,
if you don't know where you purchased it, using a Purchased From value
of "unknown" is certainly acceptable and accurate. A matter of personal preference that varies greatly from subscriber to subscriber is how discerning you should be in differentiating certain details. Is a boxcar with plug doors really that different than one with standard doors? Is a 14 panel steel gondola sufficiently different from a 15 panel steel gondola to warrant indicating it as a separate type or subtype of freight car? Typically, as people become more experienced in the hobby, these differences become more important. For this reason we recommend using the Item Type field to group similar items in a category and Item Subtype fields to capture more subtle differences in items in your collection. If the subtle differences aren't that important to you, combine reasonably similar items at the "Item Type" level and ignore the "Item Subtype" level except when it is important to you to differentiate the items. If these subtleties later become important to you, go back and capture them then. The point is to not waste time maintaining detail you don't care about while also not doing anything to your database that would make it more difficult to add details at a later time. |
|
| Setting up storage locations: | |
| Using
TrackMyTrains.com is all about getting your collection organized.
The system provides many tools to help you get your data organized.
To obtain the most benefit from this data organization, it is also
important that you organize your physical storage strategy. Naturally, the larger a collection is, the more important it is to have a workable storage strategy. For those with smaller collections or relatively large layouts, the majority of their collections are likely to be kept on the layout itself. However, as collections grow, off-layout storage becomes a requirement. There are two mainstream approaches to warehousing or storage of items. One is to designate shelves, boxes or whatever for particular kinds of items. This is often called a "fixed location" warehouse system. This approach is most common with most collectors as it is really the only practical solution without a computer or extensive list keeping. In this type of warehouse approach, one sets up locations for the more common items like a "Locomotive" storage shelf, a "Santa Fe box car" box, or a "Passenger Car" case. The advantage of this "fixed location" warehouse system is its simplicity. You look in the locomotive box for locomotives, etc. A disadvantage is the frequent need to reallocate storage as your collection grows. When you get your 25th Santa Fe box car, it no longer fits in the box that held the other 24 nicely, so you find a bigger box to use or put the 25th car some place that doesn't fit into your storage scheme. Another disadvantage is that if you plan for growth, you have a lot of half empty shelves, boxes, cases or whatever. A second popular approach is often called "Random Slot Warehousing." While it does require computerization or list keeping in order to be a practical solution, it offers several advantages over "pre-assigned location" systems. To set up a Random Slot Warehouse, one simply labels shelves, boxes, cases, or whatever is used for storage. If you have a bookcase with 8 shelves, label the locations S1 through S8. If they are wide shelves and can accommodate many items, any given shelf could be subdivided, say, into three sections. S1L, S1C, S1R could be used to designate Shelf 1 left, Shelf 1 center, and Shelf 1 right. Similarly if you use storage cases or boxes, you could come up with comparable schemes to label these storage locations. With random slot storage, one often takes more into consideration the size or the frequency of access of the item than what the item is. Our experience is that one random slot identifier can be the designated storage location for 10 to 25 items, without creating a significant inconvenience. A big advantage of random slot warehousing is you never need to repack boxes when your number of "Santa Fe box cars" outgrows its location. When you acquire a new item, you consider its size and how frequently you may be taking it on or off the layout more than whether it is a "Santa Fe box car" or a "passenger car". You simply store it in the most convenient, next available random slot, record that location identifier in the database as you enter the other information about your new item, and you are done. If some day you later decide you would like to take all your "Santa Fe box cars" to a club function, you would run a report request inquiry with "'Item Type' 'equals' 'box car'" and "'Rail Road' ' equals' 'Santa Fe'", sort it by "storage location" and out would come a picking list to go retrieve all of your Santa Fe box cars. You could then change the location on these items to "Club Box" and track where you took them all. Later, when you bring them back, you could put them all in new random slot locations or use the printout to put them in their former locations. While we recommend you try the random slot approach to managing the physical storage of your collection items, TrackMyTrains.com can accommodate just about any system you devise. The important thing is that you have a system if you want to get the most out of computerization. |
|
| Organizing your field edit tables: | |
| Before
loading any of your collection data to TrackMyTrains.com, we recommend
you read the application and database guides in this help section
and study the demonstration databases. Starting off on the right track
will make the system much easier to maintain and more useful for years
to come. After you have determined how much of your collection you want to track and how much detail you wish to keep, the next step is to review the edit tables for the data fields you will be keeping. While these edit tables have some initial values in them, primarily as examples of their intended usage, you can add or delete entries as you choose. We recommend that you not try to add every value you may eventually want in a table at the beginning, but rather, you add new table entries, as you need them. The most important organizational edit tables are those on the Item Category, Item Type, and Item Subtype fields. The Item Type and Item Subtype edit tables are context sensitive. By this we mean, that for each value of Item Category you create, there will be a separate edit table of valid values in the Item Type field for that category and for each Item Category/Type combination, there will be a separate edit table of valid values in the Item Subtype field for that category and type combination. This keeps these edit tables shorter and ensures the values in them pertain to category or type of item being recorded. The next edit table preparation you may want to do before beginning to load your data is to review all the other tables and eliminate edit entries you think you will never use. For example, if you only collect HO and N scale items, you may as well take "G" out of the edit table for the Scale field. You could always add it back in later if you start to collect in that scale. Finding the value you want in an edit table will be quicker if the list of valid values is shorter. The Manufacturer field edit tables are also partially preloaded. You may want to shorten this table considerably before you start, but we caution you (for future purposes) not to change the spelling of any manufacturers. So if you delete entries in this table, (as you will probably want to) be sure to check the demo for the exact spelling before you re-add a manufacturer. A couple of edit tables that we can not preload for you are the Purchased From and Location field tables as these are very unique to the subscriber. The Purchased From table is best created as you load your collection information. The Location field table should correspond to the physical storage plan you have devised. |
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| Getting started on loading your data: | |
| Assuming
you have read the documentation, studied the sample databases, and
reviewed the edit tables, you are ready to start loading your data.
If you have not yet done this, we strongly recommend you do go through
these preliminary activities before loading your data to get the most
from your investment. You can load your items in any sequence you choose - it's really quite an easy process. Here are a few suggestions we have found that make the process go quicker and provide more consistent results. First, physically organize your collection by category. Locomotives are a great category to start with. Assuming your collection size is reasonably manageable, collect them all in one location. Next, physically sort your locomotives by type and subtype. Even if you miss a few, this will help considerably. Pick out an item and, using the "add item" function, add all information about the item, or at least all the information you care about. Double-check all the details, and then add the inventory record for the item, noting purchase information if you have it. If you are going to record physical storage locations, assign a storage location identifier, update the storage location edit table with that value, and put the collection item in a box marked with the location identifier. Even if this box is not where you will be storing it, this will make subsequent put-away faster and more accurate. When this is done, you are ready for your next item. If you have an exact duplicate in every item detail, add it as a second inventory record by selecting "Add Inventory Copy" after the first one is added. If it is just similar to the item you just added, select the "add item and inventory copy" function. This will create an exact copy of the record you just added. Go through this copy, field by field, changing only the data values that are different and at the end of the page, confirm the addition and you are ready to move on. Continuing with the next item, this load process should go very quickly if you did a good job presorting your collection. If you come across an odd item, see if you have a similar item already on file by using the "find" feature and add it by cloning the similar record or, if not, just do a regular "Item Add." From time to time, you may have to add a table entry for one or more of the edited fields. Be sure to review the edit table carefully before you add a new entry, as you do not want to add erroneous or "close duplicate" values. If you do add erroneous values that you want to undo, run a selection by the field's erroneous value to locate the records containing the "bad" value and edit each record, changing the value to the correct one. When all records have been fixed, delete the erroneous value from the edit table. Note that you cannot delete an edit table value if any record contains that value. After you have loaded your locomotives, pick another category such as cabooses or passenger cars and proceed as above. Freight cars are usually the biggest category, with the greatest variety of types and subtypes, so we suggest doing the easier categories before tackling them. If it is physically impractical to gather an entire category of items together, assemble a critical mass of some type and/or subtype and take advantage of the record cloning capabilities. The more physical pre-sorting you can do to bring similar items together, the more you can take advantage of the "Add Copy" capabilities. Not only does this cloning technique reduce keystrokes; it also helps with consistency and accuracy. Before you know it, your collection will be loaded and your will be ready to reap the benefits offered by the advanced features of TrackMyTrains.com! |
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| Finding Database Records | |
| Overview: | |
| The larger your collection becomes, the more useful TrackMyTrains.com becomes in organizing and managing it. There are several different techniques for locating and retrieving information. Reports and data extractions / downloads are discussed later in this section and elsewhere. Here we will focus on three useful techniques associated with the "Find / List" function to locate records on-line and when to use which technique. The three techniques are sorting the database, filtering the database using record selection, and tagging records to find them later by some key word. | |
| Sorting the Database: | |
| The simplest way to find records is to sort it and use the scroll bar on the "Find / List" page of the application. Clicking on the tabs in the column headings will sort the database in the order of the field specified. For multiple levels of sorting, sort the database multiple times. For example, to sort all the locomotives together ordered by type and then railroad, first sort by railroad and then sort by type and then by category. Using the scroll bar, you can scroll to the part of the list you are interested in and then select the item you want. | |
| Selecting Records: | |
|
When dealing
with large amounts of data, it is often useful to filter out unwanted
records to help focus your search. The "Select Records"
function enables this nicely.
|
|
| Tagging Records: | |
| Tagging records is the technique of putting special strings of characters in the database records, usually in the Item or Inventory Notes fields, or occasionally in Item Description fields. Some uses for this are marking items for special purposes or so a group of items can be selected as a group from the database. Examples of this include specifying cars that make up certain trains for operating sessions, holiday cars, special era equipment, groups of cars for maintenance cycles. Basically this can be used for any grouping or selection purpose you desire. Just enter the "tag" string in the field you choose on all items you want to tag. Then, using the "Select Records" feature, simply specify the field you placed the "tag" in, the relational operator of "contains", and the value equal to the tag string you are using to mark the set of items. | |
| Maintaining the Database | |
| Overview: | |
| Database
maintenance may well be one of the more tedious parts of any computerized
system, but it is also one of the most important. The old saying "Garbage
in, garbage out" is indeed a true one. With TrackMyTrains.com,
we have gone to great lengths to provide features that reduce the
tedium and enhance the accuracy and consistency of database maintenance.
The effort you invest in taking good care of your data will reward
you many times over for years to come. Suggestions we provide here are best practice techniques for performing database maintenance activities and assume you understand the basics. Be sure to review the Application Guide for the details of performing maintenance activities and the Database Guide for details on suggested field usage. This section is organized according to the type of data base maintenance. |
|
| General Techniques: | |
|
A few hints about good techniques of data maintenance are:
|
|
| Adding new records: | |
|
The hints on adding new records are:
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|
| Changing (Editing) records: | |
|
Some hints on performing record changes are:
|
|
| Connecting Items and Components History: | |
|
Occasionally, the nature of an item will change over the period you own it, or in the form you choose to inventory it. Some subscribers may want to track this in their collection database. A few recommendations on how to handle certain situations of this kind are given here:
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|
| Deleting records: | |
|
A few comments on deleting records are as follows:
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|
| Maintaining field edit tables: | |
|
|
| Creating Reports | |
| Overview: | |
| There
are many uses for the report writing capability of TrackMyTrains.com.
This is the fun and rewarding part of the system. It is where you
will receive many benefits from your data maintenance efforts. The
more accurately you have performed your data maintenance, the better
and more useful your reports will be. The advantage of a report writer over a selection of predefined reports is that it lets you create the reports you want based on what it is you want to do with them. We suggest that it is better for you to create more reports with each of them aimed at a specific purpose than to try to have a few all-encompassing reports. We suggest limiting the fields you display on a report to those that will have real use towards your intended purpose. There is only so much room on a sheet of paper and you will have less clutter and more manageable information if you use the print space sparingly. When you develop a useful report, be sure to save the specifications at your site for future reference. Over time, you can build a library of useful reports. However, if one report varies from another by only one or two aspects, you may prefer to simply modify one of your standards for the particular variation at the time you run it and not save all these. Give your reports meaningful mnemonic names that will help you find them again in your library. Save trees! Remember, you don't need to always print these reports. You can save them in electronic (HTML) format just by using the File Save feature of your web browser. They can be reviewed on-line. You can attach these electronic versions to email and distribute them. |
|
| Record selection techniques: | |
| Specify
the records you want reflected on your reports using the record selection
specification fields. Like the on-line "find" function,
this gives you the ability to filter out records that do not meet
the criteria you specify. The "Finding Database Records"
in this Tips & Techniques explains this capability thoroughly.
Remember that using multiple field selection criteria results in more
restrictive filtering of records. One issue that sometimes confuses new users is the occasional appearance of what seems to be duplication of items on reports. If a selection criteria or display criteria in a report specification refers to the inventory portion of the database ("Invty" precedes the element name), the item information will appear once for each qualified inventory record associated with the item's record. This is as it should be since the inventory information could differ from inventory record to inventory record associated with a given item The use of tags - that is, data strings stored in free format fields such as Notes is a very useful technique for grouping items you would like reported together, because you can select records to be included in a report based upon a selection criterion specifying the record's field contains that data string. Some good examples of this technique are given in the special reports tips below. A couple "special"
recommended record selection techniques are as follows: |
|
| Some Special Reports: | |
| You
can create many different reports with TrackMyTrains.com. In this
section, we give some hints on additional reporting capabilities that
may not be immediately obvious: Summary Statistics Reports are reports that present summary counts or financial valuation information about you collection without showing all the details. The technique for producing this type of report is to specify the selection criteria you want, a sort and count criteria of what it is you are trying to gather statistics on, the fields you want summed, but no detail fields. With no detail fields specified, only the "control breaks" will be shown, which will display the criteria for the thing being counted or summed on a line with the count or sum. Operation Session Reports are reports you can create to support your operating sessions. They can help you assemble trains, put them back away after an operating session. If you prefer car movement lists for your sessions, you can create these. The technique for the first two reports is to put a data tag such as a unique Train Number designation in the "Inventory Notes" field of each locomotive or car for the train. When assembling the train, create a report selecting items that contain the train number designation in the "Inventory Notes" field and sort it by and display inventory location to create a picking list. To put the train away, create just use the same report to tell you where to put the cars away. To create car movement instructions, put the original layout position in the beginning of a notes field and the target location later in the same field. Creating reports by selecting the cars for each initial layout position will help you spot the cars correctly before the session if you also print the storage location. Operators can also use the system to print create yard switching reports by destination and assign the cars to outbound trains. Purchase & "Put away" Reports include shopping lists, receiving lists, and warehouse management reports that help you manage the physical side of your collection. While the "wish list" feature may be used to track longer-term or "dream" items, the shopping list is aimed at more immediate purchases. A technique for maintaining shopping lists is to mark items you want to buy as "wish list" items, enter a Purchased From value of "Shopping" or if you have a regular place you buy the item, mark that as the Purchased From value and leave the Purchase Date blank. Then to make your shopping list, simply select records based on Wish List being checked (Equal 'Y'), Purchase Date being blank, and Purchased From "Not Equal" blanks (or the name of the place you are about to go shopping) and sort it by Purchased From. You probably want to display item description information and anything else that will ensure you are buying the exact item you intend to. When you get your purchases back home, make an on-line receiving list by selecting records by the same criteria as your shopping list and, as you unpack each item, select it for update, update the inventory record with purchase date, price information, anything else relevant, assign it a storage location, and put it away. From time to time, it is a good practice to run an inventory of your "warehouse" by storage location and audit that your computer records are in sync with your physical collection. This kind of regular auditing and record keeping will make your system more accurate and therefore, more useful. Collection Data Maintenance Reports are like warehouse management reports, except they are more directed towards keeping your database in order than the physical collection itself. Occasionally you may want to check for duplicates on your database, or clean up erroneous data, or as you become more detailed in managing your collection, supply missing fields in existing records. One way to find duplicate items is to run a sorted listing of a category in type, subtype, railroad, and road number or similar fields that would sort duplicates to appear next to each other. If you do counts by this same criteria and leave out all the details, you will get a summary style report. Just quickly scan down it for counts that are not equal to '1' and you will have the items you need to check for possible duplicates using the find function. A summary report of this type is much easier to read than sifting through the details and looking for duplicates that way. While reports may be very useful in certain data maintenance situations, in many others, it may be better to use the "Select Records" feature of the online "Find" function because it will select and present the group of records that you want to repair or maintain. Examples of this are records containing an erroneous value such as a misspelled railroad name or missing some field that you now wish to begin maintaining. |
|
| Media Alternatives: | |
| While most people think of reports as printed media, the reports you receive from TrackMyTrains.com can be viewed, transmitted, and stored in electronic media, which makes for more convenient handling and saves paper. We recommend you consider this paperless alternative whenever practical. Any reports generated by the system's report writer can be scrolled through and viewed on-line, just like any web page. These reports can also be stored on your local disk drive as web pages, or they can be stored and then emailed to others, saving paper, postage, and time. In all cases, the only trick is to give the report a unique name when you store it, using the "file" function of your web browser. If you want a data file, rather than a report, use the file extraction and download feature rather than the report writer to do this. It has the same selection and sorting options as the report writer although it does not have the counting and summation capability. | |
| Formatting Techniques: | |
| On large reports, we recommend that you print one or two pages to make sure you are satisfied with the format of your report before printing out the entire report. To get more data per page, experiment with specifying smaller fonts or smaller grid outlines. The grid outlining the fields can be completely eliminated by specifying a grid size of '0'. Another option for getting more data fields across a page is to print in landscape rather than portrait style. These printing instructions are readily specified in the "file / print" options of your browser. | |
| Creating File Downloads | |
| Overview: | |
| The file download capability of TrackMyTrains.com allows you to specify data files to extract and download from your collection database. These files are created in the widely used tab delimited file format. There are many ways to use extracted data of this type. Although describing all the ways is far beyond the scope of this document, we will present a few of the more common uses. | |
| Specifying Extract File Contents: | |
| You
can use any of the record selection capabilities available with the
on-line "find" feature or report writer to pick which records
you wish to extract. Read the Tips & Techniques dealing with these
for more ideas on how to get at the records you want. As with the
Report Writer, you may sort on any data element(s) in the file you
choose and sort at multiple levels.
You may specify any fields you choose to be contained in your file. The first record of any file will be a record consisting of the standard field tag names. They will occur in the extracted file records in the order you specify them. Each field will be variable in length, depending on the number of characters in the field, with each field separated by a tab. In the event you request data elements in the inventory portion of the database, the item information will be replicated in each record for each occurrence of a selected inventory record. The system was designed this way to simplify record handling by the programs using the extracted files. |
|
| Some Applications: | |
|
You can use your downloaded file extracts with into many different programs including Microsoft's Excel or similar spreadsheet applications for even more sophisticated analysis and presentations. There are literally dozens of the file manipulation and maintenance utilities available that work with files in this format. You can download a copy of your data to a laptop computer and take it with you when you will not have access to the Internet. You can save downloaded files and email them to friends and associates. |
|
| Downloading to your PDA: | |
| One
of the most useful applications for downloaded file extractions we
have found is transferring them to a person digital assistant (PDA)
and using it with one of the many database manipulation utilities
available. You can take your entire collection with you to hobby shows
and swap meets.
There are several products available for transferring files to PDA's and more being developed all the time. One in particular we have found useful is Mobile DB Lite, a product of Handmark Software. You can learn more about this fine product at www.handmark.com. This product will load the latest copy of your downloaded files to your Palm type device every time you synchronize your PDA with your PC. It also has some handy capabilities to seek and find records. To save space, we recommend you only extract and download those fields that will be useful for your purpose. We also would recommend you download multiple special purpose files rather than have one unwieldy file containing unneeded volumes of data. |
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| Maintaining Your Personal Profile | |
| We recommend you review your personal information profile from time to time to be sure it is current and accurately reflects your preferences. Since data such as your email address is critical to our maintaining contact about important account matters, it is essential that you update these whenever changes occur. | |
| Setting Up Visitors to Your Collection | |
| Just as your access to your collection is controlled by your sign-in name and password, so it is with the access of your visitors. While you can specify any number of password / sign-on combinations, we recommend you limit them to "classes of people" grouped by the rights you are granting them to visit your collection (i.e. view your entire collection, view for sale items, view wish list items, or any combination of the above. The exception to this would be when you grant visitation rights for some purpose that you plan to revoke at a later time. It is our experience that visitation privilege security concerns vary greatly from user to user, but in most cases, users are comfortable with two or three classes, usually one for "for sale" items and one for "wish list" items, and occasionally for a smaller group of people, the view only capability to visit the entire collection. | |