ABOUT PERSONAL GOLF TRACKER The intent of the program is to provide an easy way to keep track of your golf scores. As the program expanded I wanted to know more than just my scores. Now you can know much more about your game than just what you shot. Personal Golf Tracker has the following features: 1. Keep track of your scores. 2. Display your personal best on each course you play. 3. Display average scores on par 3's, 4's and 5's. 4. Compare your scores to Par, Bogey or Double Bogey. 5. Graphically Show the percentage of time you shot Par, Bogey or Double Bogey. 6. Show percentage distribution of Eagle, Birdie, Par, etc. 7. Graphically display your high, low and average hole by hole. 8. Track six special aspects of your game of your choosing. 9. Graphically display your trends of six aspects of your game of your choosing. 10. Print a hard copy of the rounds you've entered. 11. Print summaries of your performance on all courses or all golfers on a single course. 11. Enter up to 99 rounds on 64 courses of 96 golfers. 12. Analyze rounds before and after a given date. 13. Calculate handicaps. 14. Check your consistancy on each hole or on rounds played. 15. Keep summaries of your performance across all courses played. 16. Rank golfers acording to summary information you select. This program was created in part with the following programs: Microsoft QuickBasic - Version 4.5 ProBas - originally Advbas (Shareware) Hammerly Computer Services Inc. 8008 Sandy Spring Road Laurel, Maryland 20707 Prowindows Lite - a Shareware program Daniel P. Stasinski Systems Management Consultant 30 North Street Willits, CA 95490 Scredit - a Shareware program TIYLI Software 4614 Arapahoe Tr. Austin, TX 78745 QuickBasic, Probas, Prowindows Lite and Scredit are trademarks of their respective companies. USING PERSONAL GOLF TRACKER The Personal Golf Tracker program uses horizontal and drop-down menus to select the program options. Use the left, right, up, down, home, and end (arrow) keys to make your menu selections. You can also use the mouse to make menu selections. Make your selections by clicking the left mouse button. The right mouse button operates the same as the ESC key. Get help by hitting the F1 key or clicking on help in the upper right corner of the screen. Although the help system is not context sensitive you can get a menu of the help screens and select the topics. You get to the menu by hitting F1 while no drop down menus are on the screen. Said another way, hit the F1 key at the main menu. Adding Golfers: You must enter two elements to add a golfer. First enter a name. The name may be up to 20 characters long and may be any ASCII character. File names may contain up to eight characters. The program will append the file name extension of .GLF. Your file name may contain only letters and numbers. Both the golfer name and the file name must be unique meaning that you can't have two golfers with the same name and you can't have two file names the same. Adding Courses: You must enter the course name, up to twenty characters and select either 9 or 18 holes. If you choose nine holes the back nine will be a duplicate of the front nine. The slope rating is only included for reference and is not used when calculating handicaps. Adding Rounds: Before you can add rounds you must have selected a golfer and a course. Having done that you enter a round by telling the program if it's a nine or eighteen hole round. If it's a nine hole round you must select the front or back nine. IMPORTANT: The program sorts out the rounds you enter based on the date you put in for the round. This is important because when you track your statistics you won't see the trend unless the rounds were properly dated. Handicaps are also calculated based on the ordering of the rounds and they will calculate incorrectly if the rounds are not in proper order. To properly sort the date you must enter it in yy-mm-dd order and you must use the same delimiter (-) for all rounds. The computer supplies the system date by default and it works well if you keep up to date entering your rounds. If you are entering a single round for many golfers at the same time you can press N for next to advance to the next golfer in the database without having to go back through the program menus. Selection Lists: What I'm calling the selection list is a vertical menu window that opens displaying a listing of golfers, courses, or rounds. You can select a golfer, course, or round to modify or delete in several ways. You can click the left mouse button on the selection you want. In most cases you can enter the first letter of a word. This will make a menu selection for you or advance the selection list to that portion of the alphabet. You can also use the Page up and Page down keys to move around a selection list. You can move up and down and to the start or end of the list by clicking the left mouse button on the bottom line of the list box at the appropriate point. Deleting: Choose Delete from the golfer, course, and rounds menus. You will be presented with the appropriate selection list. Use the arrow keys or the mouse to make your selection. The Escape Key: Hitting the ESC key or clicking the right mouse button will back you up one menu level or exit a routine without making changes. How the program deals with files: There are three files active during a session. A course file, a file containing the golfer names, and your golfer file. There is a separate file maintained for each golfer entered into the program. Personal Golf Tracker uses these files to find the proper course and golfer. It does this by matching the course name found in both the course file and in the golfer's personal file. The names must be an exact match. As an example, if you accidentally delete a course there may be rounds assigned to that course in the golfer's personal file. You may reenter the course and it will match up with the golfer's rounds only if the course names are exactly the same. Otherwise the program will assume the course is different and will not find a match. Bottom display line (status line): The left twenty spaces contain the selected golfer name and the right twenty spaces contain the selected course name. In the middle of the status line you will find help text further explaining the meaning of the highlighted menu selection. The space between the help and the golfer name indicates the round number that is highlighted on a selection list. This helps you find the correct round to modify or delete. To the right of the help text is the comparison indicator. It tells you what the program is using to create the percentage numbers on the rounds list screen and controls the highlight on the graph rounds screen. The indicator will be P,B or D. P meaning Par, B for Bogey and D for Double Bogey. As an example, if B is displayed the program makes comparisons to Bogey. You can change this to another indicator to make comparisons to par under the Default Other menu selection. Second, you can use an alt key combination after listing all rounds on the rounds list screen. For comparisons to Par type Alt-P after the rounds listing is complete. It will re-display the rounds comparing them to Par. Setting program defaults: Other: Under the "other" menu selection there are five program operation selections and three selection relating to the display. Selecting Double Stats For Nines will double the statistics values you enter for nine hole rounds. This is helpful to keep your statistics in perspective if you normally play eighteen hole rounds. Compare To was explained above. Oldest and Newest date is a filter which enables you to avoid displaying and calculating rounds entered outside the entered date. Selecting Nine or Better means that you will not have to enter a return after entering each hole when adding a round. This makes entering rounds much faster and easier. The catch is that you can't enter a score over nine. If you have a round in which you scored over nine on a hole set this switch to "N" and the program will allow you to enter higher scores but you will have to press the return key after entering each hole score. The selections relating to the display are features you may or may not want to change. Snow Suppression slows down the display but eliminates snow on older CGA video adaptors. Sound and Explode relate to how windows are opened. You should also select either Drive A or B for the disk drive on which you will be backing up your files. Names: You select the titles for the statistics you want to track. The initial names are provided for you. As an example, you could keep track of any aspect of your game that you want. You may want to use one name as total score so you can get a graphical look at your progress/consistency on the "Graph Statistics" screen. Backup: Keeps a copy of the golfer's files with the extension.GLF. It also keeps a backup of the "golfer.lst" and "course.lst" files. The files will be copied to the disk drive you have designated under the Default Other menu selection. As with all things mechanical, you should backup your golfer files to floppy disk regularly. To set the drive to backup files see "Other" above. About the Rounds Menu Selections: High/Low Graph: This displays your highest, lowest and average scores on a hole by hole basis for the selected course. The averages that are highlighted indicate your average equals the default comparison selection. You can use Alt-P etc. to change the highlights. This will help you see the holes on which you have room to improve. Statistics Graph: This screen is intended to show trends for the latest nineteen rounds you have played on the selected course. There are six graphs available for you to keep track of the statistics you've selected to watch. The graphs are automatically scaled and are the best I could think of and still keep the program compatible with text only systems. You may "zoom in" on any of the six graphs by holding down the Alt key and entering a one through six on the keyboard. NOTE: You must use the number keys above the letter keys. Numbers on the numeric keypad will not work. This enables you to see rounds in better detail. The graphs are numbered left to right and top row to bottom row. For example, if you want to zoom in on the top middle graph enter Alt-2. The bottom right graph is selected by entering Alt-6. Alt: On the top line of the display you will see "Alt:" from time to time. This shows you which Alt key combinations are active. Pressing the keys shown will change the comparisions to Par, Bogey, or Double Bogey. In other cases an advanced program feature will be invoked. For example: In the case of the Graph Statistics screen the Alt key combination allows you to "Zoom" in on a particular statistic. List Rounds Screen: The upper portion is used to scroll through the rounds. Scores better than or equal to par, bogey, or double bogey are highlighted. The percentage line shows what percentage of time you have made par, bogey, or double bogey. Also shown are your averages for the rounds you've played plus your average scores on par three's, four's and five's. You can also get an indication of your consistancy on the rounds you have played. The bottom line displays the best score you've had on each hole. You can stop the display from scrolling by hitting any key. Using Alt keys in the List Rounds Screen: Alt P,B, and D change comparisons to Par, Bogey, or Double Bogey. Pressing Alt C will display the summary of your scores that includes all courses that fall within the Oldest and Newest Dates that you have selected. This allows you to get information that is comparable between courses. Because different courses may have different pars, your average on the front, back and eighteens is displayed as a differential rather than an average score. Typing Alt T allows you a quick and easy way to change the Oldest and Newest Dates without having to go back to the menus. Alt N will jump you to the next course in the database. This avoids the need to revisit the menus to choose another course. Handicaps: Personal Golf Tracker calculates handicaps based on several factors. You are presented with two numbers. The number on the left indicates your handicap for all 18 hole rounds for all courses. The number on the right indicates your handicap for the selected course. This can help you see how your performance varies from course to course. The program will use the entered course rating to calculate handicaps unless it is ten strokes away from course par. If that is the case then PGT will use course par to calculate handicaps. PGT will also filter the handicap calculation based on the Oldest and Newest date that you have set under the Default Other menu. You must have at least five 18 hole rounds entered before a handicap calculation is made. Nine hole Handicaps: Nine hole handicaps are based on the best 9 of the last 18 nine hole scores added to the program. It takes at least three nine hole rounds to calculate a handicap. Nine hole handicaps are based on 96% of the average differential between course par and score for the respective nine. IMPORTANT: Personal Golf Tracker calculates handicaps for your own personal use as an indicator of your performance/improvement. It is not intended for use on competitive events or when comparing yourself to other golfers. Average Deviation: Deviation is the average number of strokes you are away from your average. For example, if your average deviation on the front nine is 4.4 and your average front nine score is 44 then most of your scores are between 41.8 and 46.2. As you score close to your average your deviation will get smaller. This is a measure of your consistency. The lower the number the more consistent you are. When deviation is shown hole by hole (on the printed reports) the number is rounded to the nearest integer. Distribution: This screen window shows the number and percentage of eagles, birdies, pars etc. that you have had on the selected course. It also graphically displays your percentages. Alt keys on the Distribution Screen: Pressing Alt A will display your score distribution for all courses rather than just the selected course. Pressing Alt N will advance you to the next course in the database. Typing Alt R will open a window showing you the distribution of your eighteen hole averages on all rounds within the Oldest and Newest Dates. Because different courses may have different pars, your average is displayed as a differential rather than an average score. Pressing Alt G opens a window that displays summaries for all golfers in the database using all courses on which there are rounds entered. Pressing any key while this window is open presents you with sort options so you can rank golfers. To printout the ranking press P. Depending on your computer's speed and the number of rounds, courses and golfers in the database, it may take some time to make this calculation. Printing reports: The program contains three different hard copy reports that follow the subject of the main menu. Print Golfers: This report prints out the golfer names and the golfer file names. This is useful to see which golfer is assigned to which golfer name. Print Courses: This report prints out all of the courses that have been entered into the PGT data base. Print Rounds: This report prints out all individual rounds with a complete summary of the selected golfer on the selected course. Printing Summaries: The Summaries listings are provided to print out a hard copy of the summary data in four different ways. Course, All Golfers: By selecting this you will get the summary for all golfers on the currently selected course. Golfer, All Courses: Selecting this will print the summaries for all of the courses the selected golfer has played. Selected Course and Golfer: This menu choice will print out the summary for the selected golfer and selected course only. This is useful if you don't want to have all the individual rounds listed. You can list all individual rounds on the Print Rounds Menu Selection under the main menu item Rounds. Database Summary: the choice will print out the summary that includes all courses in the calculations for all golfers in the database. Golfer Rankings: From the distribution screen you can rank all the golfers and print the sorted results by pressing the P key while the sort criteria screen is displayed. Hints and Tricks: If you use different tees at the same course you can enter two separate courses ie: Paradise Lakes (blue) & Paradise Lakes (White). You can get a summary of your performance including all courses by using the Alt keys. See the paragraphs above for more information. You can also keep track of the cost of your rounds or lost balls as a statistic. Use your imagination. Please Comment: I'm interested in any comments, both pro and con about Personal Golf Tracker. Please forward them to me and I'll try to include any enhancements/corrections in future versions. Send electronic mail to: Compuserve ID# 72500,2272 GEnie ID# J.L.HANCOCK LICENCE AGREEMENT PERSONAL GOLF TRACKER Personal golf tracker is a copyrighted program. You are encouraged to copy and share with others the non-registered version of the program. DISCLAIMER By accepting and using this software, you acknowledge that this software may not suit your particular requirements or be completely trouble free. Properly applied this program should operate without error. However, I am not liable for your specific application or problems resulting from its use. If the Personal Golf Tracker software does not perform as described, There is no liability to you or any other person or entity for any damage or loss, including special, incidental, or consequential damages, caused by this software, directly or indirectly. Some states do not allow the limitation or exclusion of liability for incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you. This licence agreement is governed by Tennessee law. If any part of this agreement is found to be held invalid, the remainder will remain in effect. This agreement may only be modified by the written consent of the author.