Getting help on Cardbox

Before you try to contact anyone for help with Cardbox, please check the most straightforward sources of information: the manuals, and the Cardbox help file. In particular, if you are having difficulty with a particular command in Cardbox, pressing F1 when you are in the command window will give you help tailored to your particular situation.

Knowledge base

The Cardbox knowledge base is a collection of articles on common technical issues that Cardbox users have come across: it is worth checking it before you go further.

Forums

The Cardbox forums are another source of useful information: in them, you can see all the questions that people have asked in the forums, together with all the answers that were given.

For questions that have more to do with the application of Cardbox than with Cardbox itself, the forums are your best source of information. We cannot tell you how to design a database for use in plant breeding or for mineral collections, but other Cardbox users probably can. Register as a forum user and ask your question.

Asking us for support

Email your support request to support@cardbox.com. Please note that our support service covers problems you are having in the use of Cardbox. We will not design your databases for you and we will not design or write macros for you. If you need this kind of help, ask questions in the Cardbox forums or contact one of the organisations listed in the Training and Consultancy page.

You will find detailed guidance on problem submission on pages 11-12 of The Cardbox Book, which we reproduce below: please follow this and make sure that we have all the information we need to be able to help you. There is nothing more frustrating for you and for us than having to respond to your support request with something obvious elike "What is the serial number of your copy of Cardbox?".

Additional information that we may ask for

The "Help > About Cardbox" report: see detailed instructions.

A log file: see detailed instructions.

From the Cardbox Book (pp.11-12):

Reporting problems

Recently, we praised one of our users for the clarity and completeness of a problem report he sent us. It turned out that this kind of reporting was second nature to him because he was a retired test pilot.

You may not be a test pilot, but here is how to report a problem to us so that we don’t have to get straight back to you with a request for more information – which would be tedious for us and frustrating for you.

Tell us who you are and what the serial number of your copy of Cardbox is. This not only helps us check your entitlement to technical support but also tells us exactly which version of Cardbox you’re using.
Be specific. What exactly is happening? If a message appeared, what exactly did it say? If something unexpected happened, what was it and how did it differ from what you expected? "The mailing labels don’t print right" is far less helpful than "the second column of labels is a quarter of an inch too far to the left".
Remember that we can’t see what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to describe every detail of what you did: every keystroke and every mouse click.
If something is going wrong, does it go wrong every time you try it? Or only sometimes? Are you able to give us enough information for us to be able to reproduce the problem for ourselves?
Did it start happening recently? If you installed a new version of Internet Explorer last week and your Cardbox screen layout has started to look a little strange since then, we have a good idea of where to search for the cause of the problem. (This is not a fictional example: some Windows fonts have bugs in them, and Internet Explorer sometimes installs new fonts: in the past we’ve had to reprogram Cardbox to work round bugs like that).

Not every problem that is reported to us is a bug. In fact, most problems aren’t. The more clearly you report the problem, the better we will be able to explain to you what is going on and what you should do to make things happen the way you want.

Screen shots

Windows is a graphical environment and if your problem is that "the screen looks funny" then a snapshot of what you’re actually seeing is often the best way of telling us what is going on.

To capture the screen

The first step is to copy the screen display to the Clipboard.

To capture the whole of the screen: Press the Print Screen key. This copies the entire current screen display (except the cursor) to the Clipboard.
To capture a single window (for example, a command window, or a message, or the Cardbox window as a whole): Hold down the Alt key as you press Print Screen. Windows copies the currently active window display to the Clipboard.

To send us the captured screen

You have to save your capture to a file and send it as an attachment. There are various ways of doing this and some are better than others. Try not to paste the captured image directly into Outlook because this will store it as a .BMP file (usually about 2.2MB in size), which wastes disk space and makes it slow to send (but do paste it if you can't work out how else to send the image). Word often compresses images when they’re stored as part of a document, so that the overall Word document can be very much smaller (in one test, the 2.2MB image was reduced to a 90KB document). Otherwise, you can open Windows Paint, paste the image, and use File > Save As to save it as a GIF or JPEG file (not BMP). If you have access to Adobe Acrobat then you can also paste your screen shots into a document and "print" the document to a PDF file.

Error logs

Cardbox keeps a log of major events that occur while running it, and if we are trying to trace the cause of a recalcitrant problem we may have to ask you to send us the error log, or even to turn on additional logging options within Cardbox in order to put more information into the log. If this is necessary, we’ll tell you exactly how to go about it, using the command Tools > Options » Log.