You have your Custom Menu working just the way you like it. You've made it so useful that now each of your seven associates wants a copy for his or her own machine. And then there's the two servers, and your machine at home, and....
I don't know about you, but I'd hate to have to recreate the Custom Menu on another machine when I can just copy it from one to the other. Especially if there's more than one other machine.
Exporting the Custom Menu
You can select your Custom Menu in the user table and export it, just like any other ODB entry--select Main->Export or hit (Cmd)[Ctrl]-3, and save it to disk.
And with all your Custom scripts in user.command, you can do the same with that subtable.
(Or, if you're using Mimi, you can simply select each one, pack them to the clipboard, and paste them into an email message, or create a Mimi export file.)
If you're moving your Custom Menu from the MacOS to Windows, you should set user.prefs.appendFileSuffixes to TRUE on the Mac before you export; you won't be able to double-click the file in Windows unless it has the right file extension.
Importing the Custom Menu
From within Frontier, use the File->Open command to open the file in which you saved user.command (or just double-click on it in the Desktop). Frontier will prompt you for the destination in the ODB, and will ask if you want to replace the existing table. If you answer "Yes" to both prompts, Frontier will replace your existing user.command table.
Save the ODB (File->Save Database or [Cmd](Ctrl)-S).
Use the File->Open command to open the saved menu file (or double-click on it in the Desktop). Frontier will prompt you for the destination in the ODB, and will ask if you want to replace the existing menu. If you answer "Yes" to both prompts, Frontier will replace your existing Custom Menu, and it will disappear from the menubar.
It's very disconcerting, but don't worry! It's not really gone.
Save the ODB.
Open the Quick Script window (type (Cmd)[Ctrl)-;). Enter and execute this simple script:
menu.remove( @user.menus.customMenu );
menu.install( @user.menus.customMenu )
This will remove the old Custom Menu and install the new one.
If you don't want to completely replace your existing Custom Menu, change the destination in the ODB to scratchpad.customMenu when you import the new menu. Manually copy the various commands to user.menus.customMenu. Then delete scratchpad.customMenu when you're done.
If you don't want to completely replace your existing user.command table, change the destination in the ODB to scratchpad.command when you import the new table. Manually copy the various scripts to user.command. Then delete scratchpad.command when you're done.
Fred from Marketing just walked by. He says he just has to have your Extract Product Codes tool. Oh, and Sally said you have a script to reformat database reports for a web page...can he get that too? If you're not careful, you'll get a reputation!
This tutorial is complete, but I do have a few more tips.
Page 1: The Custom Menu
Page 2: Organizing Your Custom Menu
Page 3: Organizing Your Custom Scripts
Page 4: Custom Menu Management Approach
Page 5: How to Clone Your Custom Menu
Page 6: A Few More Tips
Page 7: About the Author
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