I see from this forum that Pan X is making progress with its much-anticipated release. I also was able to take a quick look at the new and improved “help” files. Looks good.
But Jim, will there be a new “Pan X Handbook” as a .pdf file? And a new “References” file as well? Similar to the existing .pdf files that I (and I bet many others) used to learn Panorama in the first place. And to which we refer to refresh our memory on how something is supposed to work.
I know you have a lot on your plate, and this is probably a lower priority than flushing out bugs. But it is pretty important to many of us, Jim. Don’t forget about us old-timers.
There will not be any documentation in PDF format, it will all be in HTML format. There may be EPUB or iBook format documentation in the future. And don’t forget the videos!
The problem I have with the video documentation is that they take so long to run. I do not want to spend half an hour each time I look up something that I could read about in 2 minutes.
I treated them like school or uni classes - with the advantage that I could pause the delivery to make more detailed notes. I now have two to five pages of notes on each video I’ve watched and I’ve highlighted the points I’m likely to want to refer back to. They’re rough and scribbled but they work.
In case anyone missed the announcement a week or so ago, the slides for all of the classes are now available in PDF format. These slides include the presenter notes. In many cases, you’ll be able to find the information you need straight from the slides. If you need more detail, at least the slides will give you an idea of where in the presentation a particular topic is covered, so it won’t take so long to find it in the video.
Maybe what we really need is wiki documentation. The documentation has never really been ideal, as far as I am concerned, even in previous versions. This community may be a better source of documentation than anything that could be put together otherwise.
I tried reading through the Help topics, got to activegrid, wondered, “What is a grid?” and ran into a dead end. That is all too common. Currently I am looking for limitations on text lists, because I think I read about one here, and I am running into a situation where a text list is only giving me about 2/3 of the 6000+ records I am trying to go through. But the documentation on text lists and matrixes is pretty siscanty. Like “Grid”, if you look up “Matrix” or “Text List,” you get items that refer to them, but not the objects themselves. This has been a weakness in earlier versions, as well.
Bruce, there is a default limit on the number of records that will be found with the search widget. I ran into this problem and changed the limit. I will send the instructions to change this as soon as I find them. I created two cheat sheets as I was learning how to use text lists. They might be helpful; they have a lot of info but not 100% of what one would like to know.
Open the blueprint for the TextListObjectbject in graphics mode (right-click when object is selected) and change the “$TextListMaxCellCout” from the default of 5000 to something higher and then click the Update Form button.
Tom’s cheat sheets are the sort of thing that I would like to see in documentation: the picture linked to the explanation of each item. I would also like each line of Blueprint items documented in the same way. I think this would be a daunting task for less than this entire group, which is why a wiki would be so great.
But at the moment, I can now look at the entire stock market, from Aligent to Zynerba, and I appreciate that!
I’ve just started trying to figure out Panorama X, and its crashing and bombing and not doing what I think it should. I’m feeling quite overwhelmed. (I’m not a computer person, but a person who uses computers).
I can see how pretty it is, and I’m excited about the potential, but daunted by the learning curve to get up to speed. I have relied heavily on the pdf documentation in the past to solve my problems (I started with Panorama 2)
No, I haven’t looked at all the videos. I just spent half an hour looking at a video on forms that showed me how to move objects around the page, but told me nothing about view as list, and text lists. I have limited time, and limited download (in a rural area in Australia).
