ToyBase

In the ‘Application’ section :

• Type the name of your organisation – this will appear in the title bar of the software and on your printouts
• Choose whether you use branches or not – check the box if you have more than one location.
• ToyBase can work with more than one currency – choose your local currency.
• ToyBase normally refers to your stock as ‘toys’ – you can change this to ‘items’ by choosing Leisure Library in Vocabulary

In the ‘Loan’ section :

• Choose how fines are calculated on overdue toys (see section 5.7.4 for more information)
• Enter how many days that you normally lend toys for

In the ‘Presentation’ section :

• Choose the font that your organisation uses (default is Arial)
• Choose the size of the screen and printer font (the printer font should be a few points larger than the screen font for best results)
• Choose whether to underline links on the screen and use background wallpaper
• Choose whether you want to show pictures of toys on screen and the size of the images as a percentage of screen width

If you have your monitor running in a small resolution (e.g. 640 x 480) you can turn off the pictures on the menu bar to save space

Click the [Save] button to save your changes. If you cannot see a save button you need to scroll down the page a bitusing the scrollbar on the right hand side of the window.

Pressing Home takes you to the welcome page of ToyBase. It provides quick links to each stock category and highlights members with overdure items. The search box allows you to clickly find member or stock records both by their numbers and words from their names. If you run several branches of your organisation (for example play centres in different locations) you can define them and allocate stock and members to the branches.

When you load ToyBase you will see the welcome page. It shows the name and maybe the logo of your organisation.

There is a search box at the top of this page. To use it type one of the following in the box and press Return:

• A toy or member number
• One or more words from a toy name
• One or more words from a member or child’s name.

You will see a short-list of toys, members and children who match the search. If only one record matches the search the view page will appear automatically. Here are some tips on using thesearch:

• ‘Ms. Smith’ will not match ‘Ms Smith’ so just search for ‘Smith’ instead
• ‘jane’ will also find ‘janet’; if you just want ‘jane’ then place a space after the name i.e. ‘jane ‘

If you work with branches then you can tell ToyBase that you would like to work with one particular branch in the current session. Choose the branch from the drop down list and click the Change button. Then on any future forms that have the branch option this branch will be selected for you. Choose ‘ALL*’ to work with all branches.

You can normally get to the welcome page by:

• Clicking the Back button until you see the welcome page. If the button is disabled then you are at the welcome page
• Clicking the Back button while holding the Alt key on your keyboard
• Clicking the ToyBase.net logo in the top left corner of some screens
• Clicking a Cancel button on some forms

You can exit ToyBase in the normal wayby clicking the X button in the top right hand corner of the window or on the welcome page:

The Print button will print the current page to the printer.

It will show the standard Windows Printer Dialogue where you can select your printer and choose the pages to print and the number of copies. If you wish to skip this step you can hold [Alt] when you click the Print button.

The Back button takes you back to the previous page that you were looking at.  For example if you are looking at a member and click the view toys on loan link, the back button will take you back to viewing the member.

It is not an undo feature!  If you book out a toy, clicking Back will not cancel the booking.

The User Guide is written as HTML files and installed with ToyBase onto your PC.  You can view them in ToyBase or your Web Browser and print as many copies as you need.

The Functions page describes each menu item in ToyBase.  I am in the process of copying each section to the Help pages of this website.