Organizing Data and Reporting Results

The Mark feature allows you to set a mark at any particular time interval during the run of a simulation. You can enter a meaningful name for the mark, to help you understand/remember why that particular time interval was important. You can then enter notes to keep track of information in association with the mark.

When you set a mark, Demography saves all the values displayed in the various graphs and tables, as well as the position of the different displays within the applet on the screen. This allows you to come back to this point, and even to start the simulation running again from that point, if you wish.

Marks allow you to summarize a simulation run or a set of runs. If you want to show someone what happens to a population at various times, instead of running the simulation and stopping it whenever you want to point something out, you can do the run beforehand, and set a mark at each time interval of interest. This can save a lot of time, especially if the time intervals are far apart, or you need to change fertility, mortality and/or age distribution settings along the way.

Exporting

In preparing reports or handouts, it is often useful to export data or graphs. In Demography, the contents of any window (with the exception of the summary statistics window) can be copied into the clipboard and pasted into other documents. For example, by choosing ìCopyî when the ìFertility vs. Ageî window is the active window, either the graph or the table (whichever is showing) will be copied onto the clipboard. The table could be pasted into a spreadsheet or into a word processing document. Or the picture of the graph could be pasted into word processing documents or into documents from drawing programs. The contents of the notes windows associated with marks can also be copied and pasted into word processing documents.

NOTE: This function is currently not available for JAVA Demography 2.0. Keep in touch, though, as it may be implemented in the near future. For the present, you can use whatever screen capturing software you have available to capture portions of the Java Demography display to copy into other applications.

Printing

You can print out a view of all the data in the windows as they are shown at any time during the run of a simulation.

Choose the Print command from the File menu to begin printing. A dialog box will appear allowing you to choose which windows to print and how to arrange them.

Saving and Opening Problems

The "Net Load..." and "Local Load..." commands under the File menu allow you to open a problem file that has been saved either on a network server or on a local disk. Make sure that you save your current work before loading a new file.

The Save command under the File menu allows you to save a problem file, along with any marks that you have set, and any notes you have made for those marks. It will remember the last time interval you reached and the position of all the displays.

The Save As... command under the File menu allows you to save a problem file under a different name from the one you opened. For instance, if you open a class problem file, but you make changes to it and want to save it to a name you choose, you would choose the Save As... command from the File menu. A window will appear, asking you to name the file. Enter in your new name, and click on the SAVE button to save the file under your new name. The old file will be the same as it was before, and still have the old name.

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