Tips & Techniques

Organizing or Printing Design Folders With Viking's Disk Manager Program

Many people don't have a program such as Buzz Tools or Designer's Gallery to help them organize their designs. They ask, "Is there a way to organize my designs and take pictures of pages of designs with the program I now have." Yes, you can use Disk Manger to do that.

When you installed the Customizing Plus program, at one point it asked you what kind of sewing machine you had. I would suggest that you click on "all machines." It will give you all the different parts of the Customizing Plus program. If you didn't choose "all machines" and you chose only the Rose or the Viking 1+, then Disk Manager will not show up. If you think you would find these instructions useful to you, you may want to uninstall the program and reinstall choosing "all machines."

Let's say you have a variety of designs in a folder or on a floppy disk. You have converted and unzipped them and deleted anything you don't want. Now, you want to organize them. I would advise transferring the designs from the floppy disk to a temporary folder on your hard drive. Call it (ABC organize) . Then, you can clean off that disk.

I made folders called "animals, flowers, children's, sewing, trees, leaves, etc. It is easier if you have folders ready ahead of time so you can simply drag the designs into the proper folder when organizing.

CREATING FOLDERS FOR DESIGNS: Open the "Explorer". If you have System 5, click on the "+" in front of Husq95 or HusPro to open that folder. Then click on the "hus" folder. Click on "file, new, folder" and you will notice those words on the right side of the explorer and they will be highlighted in blue. Type right over those words the name of the new folder and touch the "enter" key so it will register. You will now see the name of the new folder listed on both the right side and the left side.

For each new folder you want under HUS, just make sure you click on HUS first and then click on "file, new, folder" and then type the name of the new folder.

If you have Customizing Plus, your "explorer" will show the main folder as VIP embroidery. There will be a "+" in front of it. Click on the "+" to open up the main folder. Then you can create new folders under the folder called "my designs."

Make sure that you click on "my designs" folder first and then "file, new, folder" and type in the name of the folder and hit the enter key to register that folder.

LET'S OPEN TWO PROGRAMS ON THE SAME SCREEN TO ORGANIZE DESIGNS.

Click on your System 5 or your VIP Embroidery icon on your desktop and double click on "Disk Manager". Disk Manager will probably open on the left side of your screen and take up about 3/4th of the screen. It allows you to put 36 designs on the first page which is Menu 1. You could put 36 more on menu 2, etc., but it is much easier to work with 36 or less at a time. When the Disk Manager screen appears, it will have 6 spaces. You could click on "preferences" and click on Menu1 and change the figure to 36 spaces. But, even if you didn't change the number of spaces, it will automatically expand up to 36 designs as you add designs to the screen.

So, use the "open" or "view" icon to find the folder of designs that you want to organize choose the designs so they will appear on the screen.

Click on "print preview" and you will see names under the designs. Click on "zoom in" and the pictures and names appear much larger. This makes it very easy to organize.

We will use the "explorer" on the other side of the screen to help with organizing. Right click on "start" and click on "explore". We will change the size of the "explorer" to fit on the right side of the screen in the space left there. If you place your cursor on the top blue bar and click and hold the left mouse button down, you can move that screen to the right side of the desktop.

If you place your cursor on the edges of the program screen, it forms a double arrow so you can resize the window. If you place the cursor on the top edge of the window, you can click and hold and pull up. If you place it on the bottom edge of the window and it forms the double arrow, you can pull down to make it longer. Make it as tall as you can but still leave some of the desktop showing on the top and bottom and sides.

If you place the cursor on the sides, you can make the window narrower by pulling in towards the center of the window or pull out to make it wider.

You can place your cursor on that middle dividing line in the explorer and move that to the right to make the left side of the "explorer" a bit narrower. Then you can pull in on the right out edge to make that side narrower too. We only NEED to see enough of the left side of the explorer to see the folder names and 1 column of the right side. When you have only 1 column on the right showing, you will also have a scroll bar at the bottom to move back and forth to reveal the other columns.

Now, you have two programs open at the same time side by side. Every time you open these two programs, they will now be this size.

If you would ever want to see a bigger screen of each program, just touch the middle square at the upper right side of the program and it will maximize the screen to the fullest. But, make sure you click on it again to minimize it for future use.

In Disk Manager, you will see the pictures of the designs, but in the Explorer, you only see the names of the design. If you see a horse picture called "Charlie" and in "explorer" you see a design named "Charlie", you simply click and hold the left mouse button and drag that design into the animal folder in the "explorer." If you see a design that you don't have a category for, make a new folder under the MAIN folder where your other folders are.

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Some people like to print out their folders of designs. I find that my folders change too much to do this and it sure does use up a lot of ink. But, others like to do it so they will have pictures of their designs in categories. So, to print out the designs once they are organized, just use Disk Manager again by finding each folder of designs and putting as many as 36 designs on a page at a time and then print.