Each issue of Astro*Talk will include tips on current astrology programs. If you've discovered any special tips or tricks to get the most out of your software please contact stephanie@thenewage.com

Program:   Win*Star and Win*Star Plus

Win*Star Tips by Tom Goyett

Here are a couple of new Win*Star tips:

The first one amounts to setting up the display option ("Calculation Options" menu) to see that they are displayed in a given chart. Here's what I mean:

In the Options pull-down menu of Win Star there is an choice called "Chart Form Options" -- When you click on this you get the following screen:

In the screen shot you'll see that there are two sets of planets. The top one, Planets Included, selects the points that that you see on screen when the chart form is displayed, providing that they have been included in the chart's calculation. More on that in just a bit. The second set of planets, Aspected Planets, are the planets that will be included in the aspects drawn for that chart.

When you're clicking on the planets to be displayed and to be aspected in "Chart 1" you usually would not select the Asc or MC as points to be displayed. But you would choose them to have aspects drawn to them. The reason is that if they are selected to be displayed, they will be shown on the chart, like planets.

When in the Chart Form Options menu, remember that you also have to click on the three other wheels ("Chart 2", "Chart 3", and "Chart 4") and choose the planets for those as well. [These three other wheels are provided for displaying biwheels, triwheels, and quadwheels.] Include the Asc and Mc for these three charts (as points to be shown); you want to see them because the house cusps are are determined by the inner chart and there the MC and Asc would be redundant, but in the outer wheels you will want to know where they're located.

Once you have selected the points to be shown and the aspects to be drawn, there is a button on the bottom of the form that says "Save for all forms". Click this button and then every chart form will have these as the new defaults.

Now you're ready for the second part of this first tip, the calculation options. These settings are the true determiner of what can be displayed in the wheel. They may be set differently than the display options. For example, if your calculation options are set only to include the standard planets plus Chiron, that will be precisely what displays in the chart, regardless of your settings in the (above) Chart Form Options menu. The asteroids, for example, will not display in a chart unless you've included them in your Calculation Options settings.

Remember that you must have both the calculation options and the display options turned on if the planet is to be included in the chart shown on screen. That is why I suggest that you turn them all on in the display options and then only calculate the ones you would like to see. This serves simply as a convenience factor so that you need not repeatedly return to the Chart Form Options menu when creating new wheels. Yet in designing Win*Star, we strove to provide full user flexibility.

My second tip is not as hard, but it's something that you should learn. It should help you in your customizing of Win Star:

Customizing Technique Menu Buttons

Any of the Buttons on the right-hand side of the Win*Star screen can be cutsomized. If you hold down the shift key while you click on the "New" icon you will get a window just like this:

This is the same window you would get if you were to add a new chart form to a person's data. But when accessed by this "Shift+Click Icon" method, the form that you select whill be shown every time you click that icon button. Therefore when I set up Win*Star I always put in the chart form that I wish to see for quick-screen viewing. You may continue to use the default chart but there are a whole host of others to choose from. The "Preview" chart from the screen set is the one that I use as my default viewing chart. Just a simple wheel for the screen is all that I really want.

The next icon button (below the "New" button) is the "Auto" button. This is the one that I associate printed charts. Printed charts have all kinds of tables and grids that I like to see on paper but don't want to see on the screen. In the Chart Form Options menu, select the "Printer" radio button to get the best printed wheel.

Well there you have it; two tips for Win*Star. I hope that you enjoy the program and the more that you know about it the more it will come alive for you.
Happy Computing!     - Tom Goyett
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