This is the ProcessBook button icon.
I can use this to draw a button that will make a link to
an existing ProcessBook display in the
same ProcessBook or a separate ProcessBook.
Or, I can launch an operating system command with it
like a word processor in Excel spreadsheet. I can make links
to specific Excel spreadsheets, and it's a
it's just a very, in general, a good navigation tool,
a nice option that's available to you for
navigating in a way that's other than just on the Main Menu.
So, if choose Draw Button, or if I click on the button icon,
I can go ahead and draw a button
shape. On that button shape I can then make reference,
or with that button shape I'll make reference to an existing display
In this case I'm going to call this,
let's call this a Main Column Bottom.
If you recall that was the display
that we used in our demos earlier. We'll say this
is To Main Column Bottom. And I'm going to go ahead and browse.
We're going to browse for all of our different
displays. So, this is going to look in all the,
the Current, Open ProcessBook Files. It's going to look for
any display name, and if I
simply search for Everything, it'll find every display in
my currently Open ProcessBook.. So, here's
the one called Main Column Bottom. I could have also just
typed in Main,
Search, and would find that. Whoops, this is a substring search.
Look for the word Main, there we go, without the
*. And that's now making
a reference to this Main Column Bottom. Now,
we have the choice to either open this in a new window, or
have this open in the existing
window, replacing the existing window. I'm going to open this in a new
window, mostly because I haven't saved
this display yet, and if I simply
open it in the existing window it's going to prompt me to Save,
which isn't a problem. I just don't want to see that
right now. Also, you have the choice to use the
Relative Path or Absolute Path. There are benefits to both.
Sometimes if you're going to move an entire
ProcessBook and all the related ProcessBooks, the Relative Path
can, of course, save the day when you're doing that. So, let me go ahead and
say OK. Here's my icon.
Needs to be a little bit bigger. There we go.
And the point of all this is now when I click on
this, this is going to go out and run that display. As you can
see it opened it into a new window.
There we go.
So this is searching for existing displays wherever they
might be, using this directory structure. And there's other things
that you can search for in addition to just browsing for them
outright. Now in this case what I'd like to do is
actually find, not the display, but I'm going to
be making a reference to
an actual ProcessBook workbook. So,
I just wanted to show you that to show you that you can search
for displays elsewhere. Now, the
ProcessBook File is simply going to be
a PIW File that contains
other PD, the other ProcessBook displays,
and as you can see, this
is, this is going out and finding this within My
Documents. It's called MyProcessBook.PIW.
This is just a test program that I put there.
It test PIW.
I'll just call this My ProcessBook.
And we'll also use that in a
new window. So the result of this is when I
click on this, it's going to go out and launch this
ProcessBook File. It's a ProcessBook display. It's got 2 pages,
and our ProcessBook
workbook here that's got 2 pages, and 1 of them has
a display on it. That's the display.
So, every time I click on this, this is
going to go out and launch that PIW
File. Now, finally, we can make
reference to existing applications or
workbooks or documents associated with
applications, like Excel workbooks
or Process, or, excuse me, Microsoft Word documents
for documentation. So, let me give you
an example of that. I'll go ahead and create another button.
And, for this button, instead
of using or browsing for,
excuse me, browsing for files, we're going to browse
for applications. And this will go out and allow
us to find any application we need to make
access to. So, for example, I can go in here,
look in the Windows Directory,
and look for Notepad for example.
And now this is going to go ahead and
launch that.
There we go.
Now I can make reference to other applications as well.
For example,
I can just
do a reference to Calc.exe.
Say Windows Calculator.
And that's going to go out and find that calculator,
and run it for me.
Now let me do one last button.
I'll just create this by dragging this
with the Control key pressed, and that's going to make a duplicate.
So now, what I'd like to do, is browse
out for a spreadsheet. So we're going to look for
All Files. I'm going to go into where we have the
solutions stored for these labs.
And we'll go into --
that's our Client Tools. I'll just open up this
workbook. This is a workbook
from some of our learning labs.
Let's go ahead and
launch this. This is going to go out and launch a
copy of the associated application, Excel in this case,
and then launch that shift report.
We've seen people
make good use of this for things like Word documents to
go to Operating Instructions or Shift Reports
or analysis of one type or another.