This month ... Big Stacks

This issue has come up at this time of year with the number of schools that are involved with creating Grade 8 presentations in Hyperstudio for graduation. These presentations can be gigantic. Keep in mind that with most computer things, the larger the document, the more things that can go wrong with it.

Those of you who have taken the Hyperstudio minicourse should remember my admonition (I remember that word from the O.J. Simpson trial) that you should save often, save twice, and most importantly, keep individual stacks to 4 or 5 cards each. What do you do if you are creating a presentation with more cards than that?

Hyperstudio gives you a wonderful option under the places to go dialogue box to connect one stack to another. So, instead of choosing to link to the next card, or another card, choose to link to another stack instead. Your final project will end up with a number of stacks in its entirety, but should an error occur somewhere, you've only lost one part of the project (one of the stacks) instead of the whole project.

Great idea, but you'll remember it the next time you do a big project, right? What do you do with the current huge 30 card stack that you're working on and dancing around Murphy's Law with?

There really isn't a slick way to break up one big stack into a number of smaller ones but here's a suggestion that will do the trick nicely.

Make sure you read through it carefully before attempting to do this as a slip can be catastrophic!

1. Back up your original project first because this could get messy.

2. Open the project and MOVE to the 5th card in your stack.

3. From the EDIT menu, DELETE A CARD repeatedly until you have successfully deleted every card from the 5th card to the end of the stack.

4. You should be left with a stack with only cards 1-4 in it. Save this as PART1.STK.

STOP

Think of what you have right now. You should have three stacks. The original, a backup, and a new stack with four cards in it.

5. Load your original stack again.

6. From the EDIT menu, DELETE cards 1,2,3,4, MOVE past the next four cards, and DELETE the rest of the cards in the stack.

7. SAVE this as PART2.STK.

Getting the knack of it now? You're just going through your original big project saving it four cards at a time into smaller stacks.

Continue the process, creating PART3,STK, PART4.STK, etc. as needed.

Now, go into each of the new stacks and link them together as required using the ANOTHER STACK option.

Lesson learned, remember to save future projects in manageable chunks and you'll continue to have great success with major projects like this.