Gobe Productive User's Guide - The Productive Interface

- Documentation conventions
- The Productive documents
- The Productive interface
- The MenuBar
- The FormatBar
- The PartBar
- The ToolBar
- Frames & graphic items
- Selecting
- Sheets
- Cutting and pasting
- Tear-Off tools
- Page setup
- How to print
- Document size, margins, & history
- Headers & footers
- Views & windows
- Keyboard & mouse mappings
- Preferences
- Translators

# The Productive Interface

This topic presents the basic structures of the Gobe Productive interface. The Productive interface was designed for maximum ease of use and flexibility. Some of the features of this interface are described here and in the following topics.

## An Intelligent Interface

At the heart of Gobe Productive is a dynamic and powerful graphics-oriented user interface. The buttons, toolbars, and menus are simple, intuitive, and consistent.

As you switch between different frames in a document, the interface dynamically changes to reflect the capabilities of the currently selected frame. For example, if you are working in a word processing document the toolbars at the top of the screen display tools specifically for the word processing environment. If you switch to a graphics frame, the toolbars and menus change to display commands only applicable to the graphics environment.

In this example, the spreadsheet frame is active. Therefore, the toolbars and menus display buttons and commands specific to the spreadsheet environment .

## A Simple and Intuitive Interface

There are some common interface items in Gobe Productive that help you work smarter.

In the middle of the Productive window is the workspace. This is where you type text, draw graphics, and do all your work. The environment icon in the left corner tells you which environment is currently active. The remaining interface items are consistent with the look and feel of the BeOS. Scroll bars, resize tools, and the window tab all work the same as in any other BeOS application.

As seen in the figure above, the Gobe Productive interface can be divided into five sections:

Environment Icon: Indicates which type of environment is currently active. In the example above, the Word Processing environment is active.

> Icon | Environment/Document Type
> | Word Processing
> | Graphics
> | Spreadsheet
> | Presentation
> | Image Processing

Ruler: The ruler helps you guide the layout of your text and graphics. For word processing documents, there is a ruler at the top. Graphic documents have rulers on the top and left side of the workspace.

Workspace: The workspace is the main working area. The Gobe Productive suite is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) environment. Items on the screen are exactly as they appear in a printed document. The workspace also changes to reflect the currently active environment. For a spreadsheet, the workspace contains rows and columns of cells, for graphics it contains a grid, and so forth.

Scroll Bars: Use the scroll bars to move up and down or side to side in the workspace. The scroll bars are only displayed when the contents of the workspace do not fit within the window.

Zoom Tool: Click the plus button (+) to zoom in, click the minus (-) button to zoom out. You can also tear-off the zoom tool to display a handy slider bar for controlling the zoom. Right (or Option) clicking on the + and - buttons increments the zoom by 1% rather than the defined intervals. Also, clicking on the zoom percentage text reverts the zoom to the previous setting.

Tool Tips: Tool Tips are short descriptions that appear when you place the cursor over buttons and indicators. Turn the Tool Tips on and off in the Preferences dialog.

The remaining topics in this section describe more elements of the Gobe Productive user interface.

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