The Athlete's Diary

Chapter 9: Additional Calculations

Backing Up Your Log

The Athletes Diary maintains a very important document the record of hours of your hard work. Youll be very upset if you lose this data! The Automatic Backup preference allows you to automatically make a copy of your log whenever you save a new copy. This means youll have two files on your disk (one of them will be one day out of date), so youll have twice as much protection. This isnt enough, though.

For maximum safety, at least once a month, and better yet once a week, you should copy the log onto a floppy disk, and put that floppy disk in another room or even another place (like at your place of work) from your computer. This protects you against fire, flood, and theft. This may seem like unnecessary effort when nothing happens. It wont when something does! If you aren't sure how to do this, please consult the manuals that came with your computer - this is an aspect of using a Macintosh or Windows computer, and one you should be familiar with.

Its also a good idea to make a hard copy on a once/month basis at least. As you start into a new month, you might select the previous month using the selection criteria, and then print out only those entries, so that all the entries for that month will appear on the same page(s).

Dividing and Combining Logs

Two choices in the File menu provide additional manipulation capabilities for your logs. Save Selected As allows you to save as a separate file only the portion of your log which is currently selected.

When you choose Save Selected As, youll see a dialog box giving you a number of choices:

Save As Log saves the data as a normal Athletes Diary log, complete with all information about your sports, preferences, routes, and keywords. You can use this to save your races in a separate file, for example.
Save Entries Only saves just your log entries (in our standard tab-delimited ASCII format), without the sports, etc. Youll find this useful if you want to export some or all of your entries to another program.
Save As Training Program saves your log with relative dates (dates in which the last date is set to 0, the day before that is -1, and so on). Training plans (or programs) were described in the previous chapter.
Append To Existing File is designed to assist in keeping a separate race log. If you want to do this, after you have entered your latest race in your regular log, use Select By Criteria to select just that entry. Now select Save Selected As and choose Append to Existing File and that single entry will be appended to the end of the file you select (such as a lifetime race log). Note: this command will append your entry to any text file you select. It does not check to see that the file is actually a file created by The Athletes Diary.
Save as HTML File (Web page) saves the selected entries in HTML format for viewing by a Web browser. The next section tells you how to make use of this feature.

Another choice in the File menu is Merge, which allows you to read in a second log to merge with the one which is already displayed. When you do this, always open the oldest log first, then use Merge to add in the more recent log.

Saving and Viewing Logs in HTML Format

If you use Save Selected As in the File menu to save your whole log or selected portions of it as an HTML file, your log can be viewed by Web browsers such as Netscape, Mosaic, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.

Just viewing your existing log with a browser gives you one feature not present in The Athletes Diary your entire Route/Workout and Comment will show in each entry (compared to viewing your log in the Daily Log window, where just the first one or two lines are displayed). You can get additional functionality by using two features of HTML embedded images and links.
Embedded images might be race photos, heart rate charts, etc., which you have scanned or otherwise have on your computer as either a GIF or a JPG file. To have the picture displayed in your log, simply put something like the following in either the Route/Workout or Comment field of an entry in your log:

<IMG SRC="MyPhoto.gif">

(where MyPhoto.gif is the filename of your photo, and we are assuming that the file is in the same folder as your log itself). Youll find that this will only really work well if you keep your pictures fairly small.

A link might point to a Web page you have prepared yourself, or simply a text file which might be a copy of an e-mail you sent to friends describing one of your races. In the second case, save the file with a .TXT extension, and be sure to save it as a simple text file, not in some other format such as MacWrite or Microsoft Word. Now in the Route/Workout or Comment field, put something like this:

<A HREF="MYRACE.TXT">Race report</A>

The <A...> and </A> sections should bracket a word or phrase which will become a link to your race report. The referenced file can also be a photo:

<A HREF="MYPHOTO.JPG">Race photo</A>

Youll probably find that this method of including photos as links (rather than directly as described above) will be more suitable for large photos.

The folder Web that is included on our disk has sample files which show you how this capability works. From your Web browser, use Open File or Open Local (depending on browser) to open the file mylog.html.

Exchanging Data with Other Software

Using the Clipboard

Depending on which window is the active window, the last item in the Edit menu will read Copy Selected Records, Copy Totals, Copy Graph, etc. The log entries and totals are copied to the Clipboard as text; graphs, journal pages, and calendar pages are copied in a graphical format.

Full Data Import/Export

In order to allow for both import and export of data from The Athletes Diary, your training log is stored as a simple tab-delimited ASCII text file. Each entry in the log appears on a separate line; individual fields within each entry are separated by tabs. Full specifications for the information in each field are found in the file Data Conversion Information in the Data Conversion folder on your master disk (FORMAT.TXT in the Windows version). Because of this simple format, your log can be read by virtually every word processing program, page layout program, and database program available; no export function is necessary. You may, however, wish to use the Save Selected As menu (with either your entire or just part of your log selected), and choose Entries Only so that you export only your log entries themselves, not your sports, preferences, etc.

Using Other Software to Modify Your Log

There may be times when you wish to use other software not to simply read your log, but to modify it. You might, for example, want to make use of the global search-and-replace feature of your favorite word processor. If you open your log with another program and then modify it, be sure to save it as TEXT, not in the native format of the other software.

Macintosh only: After you modify your log with another program, if you double-click on the file to open it, it will open the word processing software, not The Athletes Diary. To re-open the log with The Athletes Diary, you can drag-and-drop (drag the file on top of the icon representing The Athletes Diary and let go), or you can simply open The Athletes Diary, and then use Open in the File menu to open the log. Once you modify the log and save it, it will once again belong to The Athletes Diary and double-clicking will once again open the correct software.