Tips and Tricks

The montage.factory tips and tricks dialog is shown below:

This dialog has the following controls:

Close Closes the Tips and Tricks Dialog
Next Tip Selects the next tip in sequence
Show Tips at Startup If checked then when montage.factory starts up, the Tips and Tricks Dialog is automatically opened

List of Tips and Tricks

Just in case you want the tips and tricks shown by the dialog as one single list, here they are.

Context Sensitive Help

If you press the Help Key ( F1 on a PC) then you can get context sensitive help, including within Dialogs.

Keyboard Shortcuts

montage.factory supports numerous keyboard shortcuts as an alternative to using the mouse.

Take a look in the online help or the montage.factory manual for details of the supported keyboard shortcuts

Object Colouring

If an Object such as a Wave or is coloured blue, then it is being referenced by another Object.

If you right click over a blue Object you'll find a "List References" context menu, which will show you the Objects that reference this one.

Find/Find Next Category Tool Bar Buttons

If you hold the SHIFT key down whilst pressing the Find or Find Next tool bar button the operations performed change from:

Table Sorting

You can sort Tables by clicking in the Table Column headers.

For example, if you click in the Category Column then the Table will be sorted by Category

You can only DRAG COPY Certain Objects

If you are trying to perform a drag operation on certain data types and are wondering why montage.factory is not allowing you to perform the drag, try holding down the CTRL key during the drag to see if this is then allowed. Holding down the CTRL key turns the operation from a Drag Move operation to a Drag Copy operation.

Sometimes during a drag operation, the only sensible operation that can be undertaken is a copy operation, for example:

Copying/Moving Objects to a Different File

When you copy an Object to a different file then any Objects it references can also be copied at the same time.

For example of you move a Performance to a new File, then the following Objects are also copied (assuming they are present within the file):

I think you'll agree this is a cool feature!

This feature can be selectively turned off for different Object types if required within the Preferences Dialog.

Workspaces

montage.factory allows you to save a Window arrangement as a Workspace which you can then recall at a later date.

Moving Objects within a File

When you move an Object within a file then any Objects that reference the Object type being moved can be updated to ensure they all still reference the correct objects after the move.

For example of you move a within a file then all the Live Set Slots are updated

I think you'll agree this is a cool feature!

This feature can be selectively turned off for different Object types if required within the Preferences Dialog.

Montage File Formats

Whilst montage.factory was written primarily with OS Version 3 files in mind, I have provided legacy OS file support for the older file versions for OS 1.5 and OS 2.0 as a lot of the publicly available Montage files are provided in these formats.

montage.factory will preserve the format that a file is in. When you copy data between files of different formats then it is converted to the later format. You can only copy from older to later file formats