By this time, I hope, many of you have tried the new Tree option in the latest version of AMTS.Cattle.Pro. When Vijay first gave me a beta version with it, I was immediately climbing through it to see how I could use it. I have found that it is my new, preferred, way of navigating the program. The rest of the team looked at me funny (I’m used to that) when they saw/heard how excited I was by something that seemed so small. I have found I am much more efficient working with the tree. So much so, that I went into settings and turned it on all the time!
In my office I have an external 27-inch monitor; it helps in my tree use. I’ve found that even when I’m working remotely off my notebook, I’m still using the tree. How I position other screens in relation to the tree varies, but I always keep the tree open.
Here is what I do: For my External Monitor 1. I have the tree open and positioned all the way on the left of the screen.I (I have played around with the sizing of it to keep it as narrow as possible.) 2. On the right side of the screen, I have the recipe screen open. I have sized that window to take up the remaining free space.
Here’s how it looks on my external monitor.
As you can see, I have snapshots and safe min/safe max columns turned on as well. Most of you don’t use the safe min/max columns (yet). They will become more interesting to you soon as we are doing some new and exciting work with the advanced optimizer (stay tuned!). I digress, Back to the tree. The tree can be used to change inputs on locations/cattle/feeds. Let’s say I wanted to change the inputted milk for this group, I simply would click on the left side to the cattle group, change the milk input. Then, and this is important, click back on the recipe side (to make the recipe screen active again) and evaluate the results. NOTE: you must click back on the recipe side for the calculations to be updated! Or, let’s say I wanted to change the temperature in the location. Click on the location name, change the temperature, click back on the recipe and evaluate. The tree changes depending on where you click. For example if I click on Location 1, I see this:
There, I can change the inputs. Click on the cattle group (in this case sbm since this was a trial I was reviewing) and it now shows this:
Want to change to a different group/recipe? On the screen above, see how “sbm Recipe” is grey?
That’s because it is a button. Click on the button and the recipe screen for that group loads. I have gotten in the habit of changing between recipes using the tree. If you have a large file (lots of groups and inactive recipes), navigating this way is straightforward as you go to the recipe actively fed to that specific group. You can edit feed analysis in the tree as well.
When I am working off a 15-inch notebook monitor I have to change things. When I’m on my notebook, I have the recipe screen overlapping the tree. That’s fine. I can still move back and forth between the tree and recipe screen.
On my notebook, it looks like this:
See how I’ve put the recipe screen slightly overlapping the tree? That’s ok. When I click on the tree side, it looks like this:
I just go back and forth between the two sides.
If you have not tried it yet, I urge you to do so! We will be adding new functionality to the tree. We actually envision, in the not so distant future, that you will be able to do everything from the tree and the recipe screen! If you have ideas, let us know.