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                           SlideShow.Txt
A description of Gary White's SLIDSHOW.WFM and associated files
by Ken Mayer, dUFLP Librarian ...

                          February 28, 1999
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What is this? 
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I was tinkering one day with an idea based on ICon 98 -- Keith
Chuvala did a couple of presentations and had created a form
with a treeView that navigated through a table and showed the
contents of a memo field in an editor. He used this to present
his "slides" rather than using one of the commercial tools like
PowerPoint or whatever.

I was rather taken by it and wanted to see if I could create something
that was a bit more generic than his (his was limited to the number
of levels in the tree, and more), and started throwing some code
together. I got stuck, and asked Gary (who's helped me out with
a bunch of stuff in the past) if he had any ideas.

My original idea was to allow a user to just have some generic table
out there that the treeview routines would scan through and load
up the treeItems from the contents of 'n' fields, and so on. Gary
had some better ideas ...

He ran with with. He ran fast and hard with it, and came up
with this slideshow, which is much more than I had envisioned.
It's pretty spiffy, and has a lot of functionality that I hadn't
thought of (and I doubt Keith had, either).

Gary finally realized he could tinker with this for months, adding
new features (a toolbar, for example), and decided maybe he'd
better stop ...

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How Do I Use It?
================
Gary got pretty fancy here. A specific table format
is required for the use of this slide show (i.e., "slidshow.dbf"). 

The slideshow form is encapsulated pretty well -- you need
the form and nothing else, really. It will create a new
table if you need it to, it will allow you to try to find
a slideshow table, and more. You can name the table whatever
you like ...

*** Everything starts with "SLIDSHOW.WFM". Run this form either
by double-clicking on it or by typing "DO SLIDSHOW.WFM" in the
Command Window. In either case, the form will tell you that it
can't find the table -- it's looking for a specific .MEM file
which will tell it where the table is. 

The first time out, open the file "SLIDSHOW.DBF", so that
you can see everything working, and you can see the instructions
Gary provided in this table. (After this, you can
delete the .MEM file, or simply use the menu options
to create a new slideshow file ...)

Behind the scenes, Gary has a lot of code in the form that
deals with adding rows to the table, and changing values of
fields if you move the treeItems around (you can change their
parents, as well as moving them up and down ...). You may want
to examine the source code just to see how he did it -- it's 
pretty good stuff!

Tinker a bit. Next time you give a presentation, you may find that you
want to do it using this simple application rather than dealing with
those monster programs designed for presentations ...

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