Spartan Multi Clipboard Tour
In order to capture clips, Spartan just has to be running. You don't have to do anything. Just leave it minimized in the system tray. Spartan captures up to 25 clips. When you cut or copy for the 26th time without electing to keep any of the clips permanently, Spartan discards the first clip, so you always have the last 25 clips. When you want to paste back a clip or keep one permanently, click the tray icon.
This is the main window.
The yellow area, containing 25 cells, is the multi clipboard. Each time you cut or copy, Spartan will capture the clip, save it to disk and display a default name for it in one of these cells.
The white area is the area where you store the clips you want to keep permanently.
To move clips from the clipboard area to the permanent area, you can either drag them or use cut, copy and paste. If you use dragging, dragging with the left mouse button moves the clip (equivalent to cut and paste) and dragging with the right mouse button copies the clip (equivalent to copy and paste). You can also use either of these methods to rearrange clips within the permanent area and you can use cut, copy and paste to move or copy clips from one sheet to another.
To paste back clips, leave the cursor at the place you want the clip in the program you are working in, bring up Spartan and click on the clip you want to paste.
The matrix of cells in the work sheet is 9 columns by 62 rows and there are 20 such sheets. You can change sheet from the Sheet menu.
Once you have clips permanently saved in the white area, you can arrange them by dragging, you can sort them alphabetically, you can give them titles and you can highlight them with color so that all your information is organized and easy to find.
Checkout the right click menus and experiment with multi selecting. (Shift+Mouse move)
As you move the mouse over saved clips, you can see them in the preview window. If the clip is a graphic, you see a thumbnail
and if it is text you can read it
Using Views
The Spartan window is sizable over one of twenty work sheets and you can set several options.
Spartan remembers its size, position on screen, selected sheet and all of your chosen options as a View.
Once you have Spartan set up just the way you want it for one particular task and you then find you need to change your view or options for another task, then, rather than change the options you have set up in View 1, change to View 2. You can set everything up in View 2 for the second task. When you then want to use Spartan for the first task again, you can revert to all the settings you had just by switching back to view 1.
There are 8 views and you can change view using the view menu or simply by hitting the function key with the view number.
Note that there is a ninth view called "Hot Key Clips"
Any clip you save in this view can be pasted using the hot keys you save it next to without having to restore Spartan and click on it.
Spartan doesn't just paste!
It can also perform different functions depending on the contents of a clip. These special functions are controlled by buttons which appear automatically over clip names. You can choose which buttons you want from the View / Options dialog.
For example:
Clicking a "Net" button launches your browser and goes to the page
in the clip.
Clicking a "Dial" button dials the phone number in the clip.
Clicking a "Dos" button pastes the clip into a DOS window.
Checkout "Buttons" in the help index for a full list of button functions.
Don't forget to checkout the Options dialog on the tools menu. There, you can choose a hot key to activate Spartan. Use that in conjunction with the keyboard pasting options available in View / Options, and you can paste entirely from the keyboard.
Digital Photos
Use the graphics import item to import your digital photos.
You can then paste them directly to Outlook Express or Windows Mail. You can even have them automatically re-sized during the paste process.
You can also browse, slide show, rotate, print and fix "Red Eye" from the inbuilt picture browser.
With a little help from the graphics editor, you can even crop out and print your own passport photos.
Clip Editors
You can edit both text and graphic clips. The text editor includes a set of text cleanup services:
And the graphics editor allows you to create, edit, combine and annotate your graphic clips or screen shots
Help information is available within the editors in the yellow areas.
The help panels give help on whichever item the mouse is over.