CHAPTER 2 MANAGING YOUR PEN PAL MENU In the previous chapter you learned a great deal about The WALMYR Pen Pal ... how to install it, how to use it to answer a letter, and a few other goodies. You should now learn how to create and edit your Pen Pal Menu because it controls the letters or questionnaires you will be able to create, read or answer. It's really quite easy, and here's how you do it. QUESTIONNAIRE FILES AND FILENAMES The first thing you must know is that all information about a specific letter or questionnaire must be stored in a separate file. Suppose, for example, that you wish to develop a "New Product Interview" and you will store all information about that questionnaire in a file having the name, NPI. Instructions for creating the NPI file are provided in a separate chapter of this user's manual, but you must know your Pen Pal letter and questionnaire filenames in order to construct or modify the Pen Pal Menu. FILE NAMING CONVENTIONS You should know that every questionnaire or interview schedule must be given a unique FILENAME. The FILENAME must consist of one to eight characters that conform to the DOS file naming conventions. In addition, you must be sure that the FILENAME for the letter or questionnaire you are adding is unique. If two different letters or questionnaires are given the same FILENAME, one of them will be destroyed. In addition, you should never use a file extension for your filenames. The WALMYR Pen Pal takes care of that for all the files that it needs or uses. MENU STRUCTURE AND LIMITS Before explaining how to construct your Pen Pal Menu, you should know about the structure of the menu system and its limits. The simplest form of menu system is one that consists of a listing of the letters or questionnaires that are available on your system ... and that is the form of menu structure that is used. The following is an example of such a menu structure. Pen Pal Menu 1 Hello Mom 2 Dad, I Need Help 3 Crisis Is Over! CHANGING THE PEN PAL MENU Before you set about to add options to the PenPal Menu or to create your own, you should know that in doing so you will either modify or destroy the menu system that is delivered with The WALMYR Pen Pal. There is no great problem in doing that because you may always restore the original menu from The WALMYR Pen Pal program distribution diskette. You should also know that the menu system for The WALMYR Pen Pal program is always stored in a file having the name, PPMENU. In order to change your Pen Pal Menu in any manner, select the "Manage Your Pen Pal Menu" option in the main menu of the program. CREATING A NEW PEN PAL MENU In order to create a new Pen Pal Menu, you must choose the option in the "Manage Your Pen Pal Menu" menu to "Create New Pen Pal Menu". Note: If you want your letters and menu on a drive or directory other than the default settings, be sure to set your record path before doing anything else! When you select the option to "Create New Pen Pal Menu", the program will ask you to provide a menu entry. You should enter the menu entry exactly as you want it to appear for your respondents inside the Pen Pal Menu. DO NOT enter the selection number because the program takes care of that automatically. Here's an example. Suppose you want your first menu entry to represent the "Fox Hollow Depression Interview". In that case, you would enter: Fox Hollow Depression Interview The program will then ask you to enter the name of the file that will contain the questionnaire. At that point you must enter the filename for the questionnaire. In this example, you might choose to store the questionnaire in a file named FHDI. In that case you would enter the file name as: FHDI The program will then ask for another menu entry. You may add as many menu entries as you wish or you may end the menu entry option by entering an * and then pressing the carriage return key, . At that point the program will return you to the "Manage Your Pen Pal Menu" screen. Be sure to test your new menu thoroughly ... there's an option to do that in the "Manage Your Pen Pal Menu" screen. ADDING MENU ENTRIES The simplest way to modify the the Pen Pal Menu is to add menu entries to it. In order to do that you must choose the option in the "Manage Your Pen Pal Menu" menu to "Add Entries to Menu". The procedures for adding new entries to your Pen Pal Menu are identical to those used in creating a new menu. When you have finished adding new entries to your existing menu, be sure to test it thoroughly. WORD PROCESSING YOUR PEN PAL MENU Although The WALMYR Pen Pal program enables you to create and manage your Pen Pal Menu system, you may also do that with your favorite word processor -- provided that it produces true ASCII files that contain no special formatting or graphics characters. The following sections explain the format of the PPMENU file so that you may create or edit it with your word processor. THE PPMENU FILE STRUCTURE Each Pen Pal Menu entry consists of one line which contains the number of the menu entry, the name of the file containing the letter or questionnaire, and the menu entry as you want it to appear in the menu. The format of each line is: Entry_Number Filename Menu_Entry The Entry_Number, Filename, and Menu_Entry must be separated by one blank space. Also, the Menu_Entry may not exceed 50 characters. As an example, here is the main selection menu that is shipped with your copy of the program. 1 LETTER1 Hello There! 2 LETTER2 Just Getting Started 3 LETTER3 You're On Your Own TECHNICAL LIMITS The menu provisions of The WALMYR Pen Pal program are extensive. However, there are real limits to the program which you should know about although it is not likely that you will ever reach them. You may have no more than 999 entries in the Pen Pal Menu.