OTHER TIPS
Confirm Changes Option
Are you aware of WinForecast's Autosave Facility
Invalid Call Procedure or Argument
Loan Reinitialising Message
Files have renamed themselves
Amending Later Years Data
Recovering Autosaved Files from the Temp Folder
Copying & Pasting Data from a Spreadsheet
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Confirm Changes Option
You can control Sage WinForecast Professional’s actions
- When you Store, Close or Save a record or forecast OR
- When you Cancel a record your forecast numbers.
How to Do It
- From the main menu select Options>Preferences and click the Interface Options tab.
- Select or clear the appropriate options' check box.
For example: Confirm Store/Close/Save when Changed:
- When the check box is selected, you will be asked to confirm a requested action before it occurs.
- When the box is cleared, the requested action goes straight ahead
ie when you are working in a record and you click on OK you will not be asked to confirm changes to
go ahead which will save you time when you are making lots of changes to your forecasts.
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Are you aware of WinForecast's Autosave Facility
The autosave feature protects your work against power failure or a system crash. After such an event,
what you were working on will be recovered when you next start up Sage WinForecast Professional.
To enable or disable the feature, or to change the frequency at which autosave occurs, from the main
window’s menu select:
- Options>Preferences and click the Other Options tab.
- Select or clear the Autosave check box as required, and/or enter
the number of minutes between autosaves. (work done between the last autosave
and power failure is lost).
- If for some reason your recovered file is not automatically opened next time you go into WinForecast,
forecast files can be manually recovered from your systems TEMP directory, by renaming the .tmp on
any files (W4CXXXX.tmp - where XXXX is a series of numbers and digits) to be
.fs0
- You can then open up these files in WinForecast through FILE>OPEN FORECAST
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Invalid Call Procedure or Argument
When you have crashed out of WinForecast or it wasnt closed down properly,
WinForecast will attempt to recover the last autosaved file. If for some
reason the file wasnt autosaved before it closed down,
you will get an "Invalid Procedure Call or Argument" error message
which means that WinForecast is having a problem
trying to recover the autosaved file.
You will need to reset
the autosave facility in order to get back into the program.
How to Do It
- Right click on the Start Windows Button > Search > For Files or Folders.
- In the "all or part of file name" type ~w4cauto
- As this is a hidden file, make sure you are searching all hidden
files and folders by clicking on the "More advanced options"
and ticking search hidden files and folders.
- Search in your local hard drive which should be C:\ in most cases
- Click Search.
- The search should come up with two files ~w4cauto.tmp and ~w4cauto.fs@.
- DELETE the ~w4cauto.fs@ file
- RENAME the ~w4cauto.tmp to ~w4cauto.fs@
You should now be able to get back into WinForecast
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Loan Reinitialising Message
You have set the last month on your forecast file to actuals and get a message saying
"There is an error in the loan "Record Name". It is being re-initialised."
But when you click OK, its stuck in a loop and you cant close out of it.
Click on Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up the task manager, go to
Applications and End Task on WinForecast.
The reason you are getting this error message is because you have a
loan record that has no data in it. When you set actuals to a month, the start date
of the loan record will be pushed out to the next month. So if you are
setting actuals to the last month on the file, it cant push the start date of the loan
out to the next month because there is no next month to push it out to.
The record cannot be deleted because it was created before actuals was set
and once you have set actuals, the record is fixed.
NOTE: Do not setup any financed asset or calculate loan records if you are not going to enter any data in it.
If you have acquired a new financed asset during the year, set the record up before
you set the month, when the asset was acquired, to actuals if you are in actuals mode.
Solution
You need to make available that extra month so that there is a start date for the loan.
To do this, you'd need to extend the forecast out by another year.
To extend out the forecast, go to File>Forecast Extent
and increase the To date by one year.
Click OK and you should now be able to set actuals for the next month
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Files have renamed themselves
This most commonly occurs when a forecast or consoldation file have been opened through Windows
Explorer by double clicking on them.
This will launch WinForecast and open the files, however it is opening a copy of the file and the file
name will be truncated.
Please note that by opening it this way, the file can be corrupted. To avoid corrupting the file, ensure that you open it directly from within WinForecast.
How To Do It?
When you open WinForecast, you will be presented with a window that has the tabs
'Recent', 'Existing Forecasts' and 'Existing Consoldations' (if you have the consoldation option).
Please open files from within here.
If you already have WinForecast open, you can use
File > Open Forecast OR File > Open Consolidation
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Amending Later Years Data
When the active forecast covers more than one year,
you can amend some or all later years’ data based on earlier data.
You can do this for the whole forecast, or for the section,
sub-section or record highlighted in the main list of records.
How to do it
Firstly, click on the section, sub-section or record that you wish to amend.
Then from the main window’s menu select Wizards>Amend Later Years Data.
Select whether to Amend forecast or to Amend
[the named section, sub-section or record that you have highlighted].
Specify From when and To when the amending is to apply, then
select to Amend With Data From:
the previous year, last half-year or last quarter.
NOTE: You can only amend forecast data if you have more than 1 year in the file
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Recovering Autosaved Files from the Temp Folder
The autosave feature protects your work against power failure or system crash.
After such an event, what you were working on will be recovered when you next start up Sage WinForecast Professional.
To enable or disable the feature, or to change the frequency at which autosave occurs,
from the main window’s menu select Options>Preferences and click the Other Options tab
Select or clear the Autosave check box as required, and/or enter the number of minutes
between autosaves (work done between the last autosave and power failure is lost).
On occasions, prior versions of forecasts that have become corrupt can be recovered through the autosave.
This is NOT necessarily always the case, but to see if you can recover an appropriate file, please do the following:
Open Windows Explorer
Go to C:\Documents & Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp folder
Click on ‘Date Modified’ to rearrange the files so you can view the latest TMP files.
WinForecast temp files could start with a either ‘~W4CXXXX’ or ‘W4CXXXXX’
Change the extension from TMP to FS0 and it will convert to a WinForecast file.
Once you have changed the extension, copy the file to a folder that you are familiar with.
Run WinForecast and open the file from where you have copied it to and check whether it’s the file you want.
NOTE: Look at the Date modified and the Size of the file when looking for your file. If its 1kb in size, it’s unlikely that it will be the file you want.
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Copying & Pasting Data from a Spreadsheet
Do you know that you can copy and paste figures in a spreadsheet via a clipboard into individual records in WinForecast without having to import in a whole chart of accounts?
How to do it
- View the spreadsheet.
- Highlight the cells of data (ie 12 to match the months in your forecast file) you want to copy from your spreadsheet into your WinForecast record.
- Right mouse click and select Copy from the pop-up menu.
- Go back into WinForecast and click on Enter Data with the appropriate record selected.
- Put your cursor in the All box of the column you want to paste to, right click the mouse anywhere on the window that is grey and select Paste from the pop-up menu.
The data should now have been transferred into your record
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