AlPrg User Interface

When you start AlPrg the AlPrg User Interface appears:

These interface contains conventional items like a Menu Bar, a Tool Bar, a Tab Bar and a Status Bar. In the main window you open one or several calculation pages or diagrams. On the calculation pages you enter or change input data with the keyboard or with the mouse wheel. AlPrg shows the corresponding calculation result in the output fields.
AlPrg represents the results of calculation also in graphical form as diagrams. Most diagrams are conceived as graphical user interfaces e.g. the user changes values by dragging action with the mouse pointer. AlPrg draws then the corresponding results in the diagram.

Menu Bar

When you click on an item of the menu bar you open a pull down menu. With the items on these pull down menus you execute tasks like working with files, show/hide windows or pages, select languages and get help or version information.

File Dropdown Menu

If you click on the File menu item of the menu bar the File Dropdown Menu opens:

View Dropdown Menu

Clicking on the items of the View dropdown Menu you show or hide the tool bar, the status bar, and the tab bar. You create new horizontal or vertical tab groups and you can switch between the horizontal and vertical arrangement of the pages and diagrams.

Remark:
you can only hide the tab bar with one tab group. If there are several tab groups opened the tabs item is inactivated.

Pages Dropdown Menu

With the Pages Dropdown Menu you select a calculation page to be shown in the main window. The main dropdown menu splits up into several submenus (Profitability Analysis, Plant Data, and Cell Voltage):

Diagrams Dropdown Menu

When you click on a Diagrams dropdown Menu item the corresponding diagram is docked into the AlPrg user interface. When you may float the diagram window on the screen when you press the float/dock button of the diagram window.

Tools Dropdown Menu

This menu contains links to useful windows that help you to execute your tasks with AlPrg. With the exchange window you determine exchange rate that are used by the profitability analysis pages. With the examples window you excute defined examples.

Examples Windows

For quite some time Alusuisse/Alcan organized internal and later public seminars about aluminum smelting. The participants of this seminars studied examples and solved exercises with ElysePrg [Lit. 1998, 1999] an earlier version of AlPrg. An essential feature was the connection between ElyseSem, the Windows Help version of the seminar textbook and the PC-program ElysePrg. Clicking in the electronic textbook ElysSem on an example or exercise called AlPrg that calculated that example/exercise. ElysePrg contained also a list of the exercises/examples: clicking on an item of this list executed the corresponding exercise/example and a double click made ElysSem jump to the corresponding page.
With the Examples window you can execute a similar task: when you click with the left mouse button on a window item AlPrg executes the corresponding calculation. Click with the right mouse button opens the AlPrg Help Window and the corresponding page is shown.

Examples Window

Help Dropdown Menu

Click on the Help Topics menu item to open the AlPrg Help File. Further you find a link to this website. When you click on the About AlPrg... item you get informations about the AlPrg version.

Remark:
Depending on your version of AlPrg the menu bar and the dropdown menus may contain more or less items than this webpage is showing.

Popup Menu

Using earlier version of AlPrg and also ElyseSem you selected the calculation pages with a contents window. This window is replaced by a popup menu. You press the right mouse button to activate this popup menu. This menu contains essentially the same submenus and menu items as the dropdown menus of the menu bar.

Tool Bar and Status Bar

You press the buttons of the Tool Bar (and the Status Bar) to execute frequently used commands. You enter your comment for this session into the comment input field of the Tool Bar.
The Status Bar is a horizontal window at the bottom of the AlPrg window in which AlPrg displays various kinds of information. It contains also the Anode Type Button to switch between carbon and inert oxygen evolving anodes.

Tab Bar

Each title of a calculation page you have opened during a program session stay as a tab in the tab bar. When you click on the tab of a page you active this page i.e. you make the page visible if it is hidden and give it the input focus. You scroll the tab bar items with the tab bar scroll buttons to the left or right and you close an activated page with the close button .

AlPrg Windows

Depending on the operating system your computer is using and the display setting you have selected the AlPrg window may look quite differently:

You can select the classical windows display setting with practical all Microsoft PC Operating System. You may use AlPrg e.g. AlPrg is tested with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The figure shows one of the display setting you can select with Microsoft Windows XP Operating System. It seems that this display setting is not supported by the Microsoft Windows Vista Operating System.

This website shows all three display setting depending when the corresponding web page was created. The classic windows display setting consumes the least area for the windows frame but looks a little bit old fashioned and not as "sexy" as the Vista setting.

Remark:
So far the Classical Windows Display Setting was supported for the longest time. In the future it will be used to show AlPrg windows.