Spartan Multi Clipboard Tour
In order to capture clips, Spartan just has to be running. You don't have to do anything. Just leave it minimized in the system tray. Spartan captures up to 25 clips. When you cut or copy for the 26th time without electing to keep any of the clips permanently, Spartan discards the first clip, so you always have the last 25 clips. When you want to paste back a clip or keep one permanently, click the tray icon.
This is the main window.
The yellow area, containing 25 cells, is the multi clipboard. Each time you cut or copy, Spartan will capture the clip, save it to disk and display a default name for it in one of these cells.
The white area is the area where you store the clips you want to keep permanently.
To move clips from the clipboard area to the permanent area, you can either drag them or use cut, copy and paste. If you use dragging, dragging with the left mouse button moves the clip (equivalent to cut and paste) and dragging with the right mouse button copies the clip (equivalent to copy and paste). You can also use either of these methods to rearrange clips within the permanent area and you can use cut, copy and paste to move or copy clips from one sheet to another.
To paste back clips, leave the cursor at the place you want the clip in the program you are working in, bring up Spartan and click on the clip you want to paste.
The matrix of cells in the work sheet is 9 columns by 62 rows and there are 20 such sheets. You can change sheet from the Sheet menu.
Once you have clips permanently saved in the white area, you can arrange them by dragging, you can sort them alphabetically, you can give them titles and you can highlight them with color so that all your information is organized and easy to find.
Checkout the right click menus and experiment with multi selecting. (Shift+Mouse move)
As you move the mouse over saved clips, you can see them in the preview window. If the clip is a graphic, you see a thumbnail
and if it is text you can read it
Pasting Digital Photos
To paste your picture files select the first item on the Pictures menu and choose a pictures folder.
Your pictures are initially displayed in thumbnail form.....
As you move the mouse over them, a small control panel appears beneath each thumbnail. The buttons 1 to 4 paste the picture...
Button 1 pastes it format one at
full size. (Format one suits most editors and emails)
Button 2 pastes it format one at your chosen reduced size.
Button 3 pastes it format two at full size. (Format two suits
Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail)
Button 4 pastes it format two at your chosen reduced size.
The "Clip" button makes a clip from the picture and saves it in the clipboard yellow area. Use this if you want to edit the picture in the graphics editor. You can also copy, delete, rotate and print pictures from the thumbnail control panel.
Click on any thumbnail and you can browse and slide show single pictures...
.
The control panel on the single picture display allows you to browse from picture to picture or start a slide show. You can hide the control panel by right clicking or hitting Esc and you can bring it back with a left click or Enter. With the control panel hidden, you browse with the arrow keys.
All the facilities from the thumbnail control panel are duplicated here. Additionally, you can crop, fix red eye and enhance. You can rename files and you can search file names. One of the problems of digital photographs is finding any particular one among all your thumbnails. If you rename files you will want to return to, you can use the Find button to quickly retrieve them.
If your pictures are smaller than the screen, you can choose either a white or black background and if your pictures are bigger than the screen, the "< Change" button allows you three display choices:
1. Fit Window... uses the largest
size which will fit within the window.
2. Fill Window... uses the smallest size which will fill the window, cropping
any excess on the longest dimension.
3. Full Size... uses the full size picture and allows you to drag it to see
different parts.
The Zoom button is only active when Full Size is selected.
Macro Clips
Macro clips are clips with which you associate a short string of characters. Spartan then monitors your keyboard input for macro strings. When you type one, Spartan jumps in and replaces the macro with the associated clip. You can paste clips without ever bringing Spartan to the screen.
To set up macro clips, choose view 10 from the View Menu.
The clipboard is on the left and there are column pairs headed "Macro" and "Clip". The clip slots are exactly the same as clip slots in other views. You can drag clips to them from the clipboard, you can copy and paste clips in from other views or you can right click and create new clips. After creating a clip, click on the Macro slot to the left of the clip and type in the characters you want for the macro. Here is an example..
Activate the macros by switching back to another view.
The letter heading clip can now be inserted into a document simply by typing .head and the signature block by typing .sig Etc.
Why the dot? ( .head .sig)
No reason. You could use $head and $sig or head+ and sig+
You need head and sig as something easy to remember and you need the other (unusual) character so that you don't get your macro clips by accident. If you didn't use the extra, unusual character and for instance used just sig for you signature block then Spartan would paste in your signature block every time you started to type signal or sign post.
Date / Time Stamp Clips
Date and time stamping clips are simply text clips you define using codes for the various date time data fields. When you paste these clips, Spartan replaces the codes with the actual time or date data at the time of pasting.
To create a date or time stamp clip, right click over an empty white cell and select New Date/Time Clip
This is the date time stamp editor:-
Type your clip into the editor using the bracketed date time codes. Spartan shows you how your clip will look when pasted in the preview pane below the editor.
Hot Key Clips
Any clip you save in this view can be pasted using the hot keys you save it next to without having to restore Spartan and click on it.
Spartan doesn't just paste!
It can also perform different functions depending on the contents of a clip. These special functions are controlled by buttons which appear automatically over clip names. You can choose which buttons you want from the Tools / Options (View n).
For example:
Clicking a "Net" button launches your browser and goes to the page
in the clip.
Clicking a "Dial" button dials the phone number in the clip.
Clicking a "Dos" button pastes the clip into a DOS window.
Checkout "Buttons" in the help index for a full list of button functions.
Don't forget to checkout the Options dialog on the tools menu. There, you can choose a hot key to activate Spartan. Use that in conjunction with the keyboard pasting options available in View / Options, and you can paste entirely from the keyboard.
Using Views
The Spartan window is sizable. There are twenty work sheets. The window size, the sheet number and all the options shown below, Options View(n) on the Tools menu, are all saved as a "View".
Once you have Spartan set up just the way you want it for one particular task and you find you need to change your options for another task, then, rather than change the options you have set up in View 1, change to View 2. You can set everything up in View 2 for the second task. When you then want to use Spartan for the first task again, you can revert to all the settings you had just by switching back to view 1. There are 8 views and you can change view using the view menu or simply by hitting the function key with the view number.
Clip Editors
There are three clip editors. The text editor includes a set of text cleanup services:
The Time Stamp Editor allows you to create clips which contain the current date and time.
And the graphics editor allows you to create, edit, combine and annotate your graphic clips or screen shots
Help information is available within the editors in the yellow areas.
The help panels give help on whichever item the mouse is over.