Use the User’s Guide

Incline Software produces a book called Ancestral Quest User’s Guide. It is available in the United States as a paperback, and around the world as a PDF file. It has 545 pages. I use it when I need to understand how to do some of the less common things that AQ Will Do.

If you would like to own this manual, you can get it from this website:

https://www.ancquest.com/orderonline.htm#AQ16BM (This is a link)

When the screen appears, scroll down to the section labeled Training Aids for Ancestral Quest.

My computer isn’t close to my book cases, so I buy this book in PDF format. I keep it and its predecessors in the C:/Data/AQ/Manual/ path.

My memory isn’t what it was when I was younger, and I don’t like searching around to find where my manual is, so I let AQ go get it for me.

My last post described how to get AQ to search with Google for obituaries. AQ passes a string to your browser, and the browser executes the string. Typically we think of the browser as a way to access the internet, but that isn’t all it can do. It can also access files on the computer’s file system.

You have probably seen references to websites which begin with the characters https://. The https stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. Browsers can also execute strings beginning with file://. One such statement might be:

file://C:/Data/AQ/Manual/AQ16_UsersGuide.pdf

This is the string we will use to access the Ancestral Quest User’s Guide. The process is just like the process we used to access the Google website, but this time we will go, not to the internet, but to the hard drive, or some other device known to the file system.

To begin, click on the Internet tab at the top of your AQ screen, then select the Favorite Sites menu item. When the My Favorite Web Sites screen appears, click on the Add button. The Add/Edit Favorite Site screen appears.

Fill in the Title and URL boxes. Note that the Search this site** checkbox is not checked, so AQ will pass this string directly to the browser.

You will probably need to change the string in the URL box because the path to the folder where you store your User’s Guide will not be the same as mine. Store the guide wherever you want, but put the path to the file between the file:// and the AQ16_UsersGuide.pdf.

When the User’s Guide opens, you can use the <CTRL>F keys to find any topic contained in the book. The ^ and ˅ characters will allow you to skip through the text to prior or next occurance of the desired word(s).

When AQ comes out with a new major version and a new User’s Guide, you can buy the guide, and store it in the same folder with the older version, then click the Internet tab and select the Favorite Sites menu item. There you can click the modify button and update the name of the file.

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