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The Main Menu is available to help you navigate between the data entry forms, queries, and reports in the Conference Manager. You can also open these objects from the database window. The Main Menu should open automatically each time you open the database, but if it if gets closed you can reopen it by opening the form frmMainMenu from the database window.
To add additional objects to the Main Menu, such as a new query or report, add a new record to the table tprgMenuObjects. Before you see the new item on the Main Menu, you will have to close and then reopen it.
The data entry process begins when a potential author enters the information about her presentation. This can be done manually by printing out a form, filling it in, mailing it, and retyping the information into the Papers data entry form (see below). A faster and less labor-intensive option is for authors to submit their proposal electronically over the web. The Conference Manager has been designed to work with a customized web form (see sample) which solicits information from the user and then emails it to one of the conference organizers. To use this web based form, you must also install on your web server two CGI scripts written in Perl. The first of these scripts presents the presentation information back to the author, and gives her a chance to change it. The second script emails the information to the conference organizer in a special format that can be read by the Conference Manager, and also send a confirmation message back to the author.
Note that the CGI scripts will almost certainly require some modification, at a minimum changing the email address where the information gets sent to, and installing them will require some knowledge of how to set permissions on a web server. Also, to adapt the proposal submission web form to your particular conference, you will need to do some editing of the HTML code.
Most of the data entry for a conference takes place in the Papers data entry form. At the top of the data entry form are two combo boxes which allow you to find a paper, either by its title or author. You can also flip through the papers using the radio buttons at the bottom of the form.
At the bottom of the form are buttons for deleting a paper or starting a new paper. If you've set up the web form and CGI scripts for submitting paper proposals (see above), instead of typing in the propoosal you can use the 'Paste from Email' button. The way this works is:
Other important notes about the Paste from Email feature are:
Whether you paste presentation information from the clipboard, or type it in from a printed form, you can edit all information about the paper on the main part of the form. At the top of the form are boxes for the paper title, format (i.e., talk or poster), and optionally the name of a table/booth (for posters primarily). If you click the 'AA -> aa' button, or double-click in the title field, Access will convert the title to all lower case, which can be helpful if an author has entered the title in all caps on the web form.
Most of the information about a paper is entered under four tabs. In the author tab, the names of the authors appear. Note that an author will not appear in the drop-down box until he/she has been entered in the Authors form. You can open the Authors data entry form either by double-clicking on the drop-down box, or from the Main Menu. Note when you paste in presentation information from an email sent by the web script, the author(s) will be automatically added.
Each author should also be assigned an order number. In the wonderful world of academia, the author order is important, in particular the first author is considered to have done the most work on the paper. Authors should assigned sequential order numbers, and no two authors can have the same order number.
The abstract tab displays the paper abstract and one or more keywords. Authors have a chance to select keywords of their choice when filling in the submission form, or keywords can be added manually. In order for a keyword to appear in the drop-down box, it must first be entered in the Keywords data entry form which can be opened either by double-clicking on the keyword box or from the Main Menu.
Note that the Conference Manager supports a limited number of HTML formatting tags in the abstract field, including tags for bold characters (<B>some text</B>), italics (<I>some text</I>), and underline (<U>some text</U>). If an author inserts these tags in their abstract, they will appear formatted in the HTML version of the conference program. However these tags will be stripped from the abstract in all reports created by Access, because Access does not support within-field character formatting on a report.
The Panel and Equipment tab is pretty self explanatory. Note you can only assign a paper to a single panel which must already be defined in the Panels data entry form, which can be opened either by double-clicking on the panel combo box or from the Main Menu. Also it is often easier to assign papers to panels using the Panel Builder.
The last tab presents administrative information about the paper submission, including the date it was submitted, any additional comments made by the author, reviewer remarks, and its status. You can also keep track of all correspondence sent to the author, including the date that an acknowledgement of receiving the proposal was sent, and the date a message was sent informing the author about the status of the paper.
The Conference Manager can also help you compose emails to the authors by clicking on the 'Compose email' buttons. The text of the email message that is composed will depend on the status of the paper (accepted, rejected, or conditional acceptance). You can customize the text of each type of email message by clicking on the 'Options' button and changing the following option parameters:
| Sample Parameter | Value |
| Paper accepted - subject | subject of the email message |
| Paper accepted - cc coauthors | yes or no |
| Paper accepted - body | body of the email message |
| Paper accepted - append abstract | yes or no |
The table above lists the options available for an email message informing the author that their paper has been accepted, but there are similar parameters for email messages saying the proposal has been conditionally accepted or just rejected. All of these options are accessible by clicking the 'Options' button.
You can use any of the following field names in the body option to tell the Conference Manager to substitute information from the first author into the body of the email: LastName, FirstName, InstitutionName, Department, Email, Phone, AuthorURL, Address1, Address2, City, State, ZipCode, Country, Registered. You can also use the following fields to insert information about the paper: PaperTitle, PaperFormatName, Abstract, PaperFormatVerb, ReceivedOn, SpecialComments, SessionName, PanelName. If you use one or more of these fields in the body of your email option, be sure to enclose the field name in [brackets]. For example, you could start the body of your email message with: Dear [FirstName] [LastName],
The email message you compose can either be opened up in the default MAPI email client (e.g., Outlook, Eudora), or notepad. If you send it to an email client, it will only compose the email, it won't actually send it until you give the appropriate command in your email software.
The Authors data entry form is where you enter information about authors. The Authors form can be opened from the Main Menu, or by double-clicking on any drop-down box where the names of authors appear. The fields are pretty self-explanatory. If you don't see the author's institution in the institution drop-down box, double-click on the drop-down box and add it to the list of institutions. When you paste in paper information from an email message sent via the web script, author names are automatically appended to the authors table. But sometimes slight misspellings (e.g., Steve vs. Steven) can result in duplicate author entries for the same person. If this happens, you should delete one of the author records, but first make certain that all papers have been reassigned to the author record you wish to keep.
The institituions form is where you enter information about the institutions of authors. This form can be opened by double-clicking the institutions drop-down box on the authors from, or from the Main Menu. When you paste in presentation information from the web script, the Conference Manager will try to find a matching institution record, but if it can't it will ask you to select or add a record.
You enter keywords in the keywords data entry form. This form can be opened by double-clicking on the keywords drop-down box on the papers form, or from the Main Menu. When a user enters his/her own keywords on the web submission form, those new keywords will be automatically appended to the keywords table.
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Introduction | Data entry | Building a program | Customization |
