The UAUUG held a one day meeting to provide a detailed technical insight into the uses and workings of AVS software. The meeting was held in the Lascelles Williams Training Room, Manchester Computing, Oxford Road, Manchester.

The day was divided into two sessions. There were two half-day presentations and tutorials, one from Paul Lever of the IAC on "Importing arbitrary data into the AVS/Express 'FLD' format" and one from John Stringer of AVS on "Using Gsharp to add high quality plots to Microsoft Office products".

Delegates who did not wish to attend both sessions could attend clinics run by the presenters in an adjacent room. John was available in the morning to discuss other facilities in Gsharp and Paul held a surgery in the afternoon to cover further problems of FLD formats.

Paul's tutorial covered:

• How to import data into AVS/Express
• Understanding the structure of the data
• Explaining the requirements of the AVS/Express Field
• Lots of examples of real data and Field Files
• Hands-on experience of importing and visualizing data
• Moving beyond the Field File Format

Further details are available in this abstract

Paul's full notes are available online:

• Powerpoint file (510kbyte)
• PDF file (2.7Mbyte)
• HTML (2Mbyte in total, output from Powerpoint and may only work with IE)

John's presentation included:

• Pasting bitmaps into PowerPoint
• Creating rescaleable images for Microsoft Word.
• Taking data to and from Microsoft Excel
• Taking data to and from Microsoft Access
• Using Gsharp to visualise various forms of data
• Configuring Gsharp for a particular project

Here are John's notes (as a 544kbyte PDF file).

The event was free but there was a charge of 10 pounds cash for lunch

The outline timetable for the day was: