1. How does the Postal Chess Organizer assist for postal or email chess record keeping?
The Organizer allows all relevant game data, such as moves, sent/received/postmarked dates, reflection times, and game position to be stored in an Excel worksheet. All games for a given postal or email tournament are stored in their own worksheet, and all worksheets are stored in one file. The Organizer computes reflection time based on the entered received, sent and postmark dates. It also provides a tournament crosstable to track the standings for your event.
For tournament setup, the organizer provides a powerful setup macro that allows the user to simply enter the name and address of each opponent into a form, and then the game worksheets and tournament crosstable are automatically generated.
2. What does the ad mean when it says "includes freeware chess fonts...also supports Linares, Zurich, and Hastings fonts."
The Organizer includes freeware chess fonts, which should be installed before running the tourney setup program.. The setup program allows the user to select these fonts for all the chess diagrams in the game file. If, however, he already has the Linares, Zurich, or Hastings fonts (from Alpine Electronics) already installed on his computer, he may elect to use these instead.
3. How is the Postal Chess Organizer superior to conventional record-keeping methods?
In addition to the obvious advantages of having the games stored electronically, the Organizer is "re-usable." In other words, you can always generate another tournament file for each new tournament, thus avoiding the hassles of re-ordering score sheets. The Organizer automatically calculates reflection time based on the entered sent or postmarked dates; it also generates a crosstable if the user so chooses. The game position diagrams are stored in the same worksheet as the move records for convenience.
4. If I enter a 7-man Golden Knights tournament, will there be 6 different files (one for each game?)
No. All games for each tournament are stored in one file; each game, however, has its own worksheet.
5. Do I have to manually back up the tournament files, to avoid loss of data in case the file gets corrupted?
No. By default, the Organizer saves the file with the Excel "Always Create Backup" option. Every time the tournament file is updated, the last version is saved as the backup. Of course, it is always desirable to backup the latest file onto different media.
6. What are the computer requirements for installing the Postal Chess Organizer?
An IBM-compatible PC running Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, or WindowsXP, and Microsoft Excel 95, Excel 97, Excel 2000, or Excel 2002. Please note that Microsoft Office includes Excel. Free disk space required is under 2 MBytes.
7. Why is Microsoft Excel required?
Excel is a natural because of the tabular format and the date math capabilities. In addition, Excel Visual Basic allows sophisticated macro routines to run the tournament setup routines. The Excel Visual Basic also serves as a "virtual machine", guaranteeing easy portability to new releases of Excel or Windows. Moreover, many users now have MS Office or Excel anyway. If the program was written in C or C++, development time would have been at least 20X longer and portability from one Windows version to another would have been much more difficult.
8. Is the MacIntosh computer supported, if the program is basically running under Excel?
While the Postal Chess Organizer is not officially supported on the Mac, one user did report success running the program under Office '98 for the Mac. Therefore, we are offering the program to Mac users with the same 14-day money back guarantee.
9. What sort of technical support is provided?
Using the Postal Chess Organizer is quite straightforward. Help files are provided in Microsoft Word and text format. In addition, email and call-back support is also available.
10. The Organizer comes with a 14-day unconditional money-back guarantee. What percentage of the users have actually returned the product?
Less than 7%, with over half of those claiming that "they didn't realize Microsoft Excel was required."
11. How can I order the Postal Chess Organizer?
Click on the "Ordering Info" hyperlink below.
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