Guide on how to use this program:

1: Viewing notes Using the list view.
2: Filtering notes How to selectively view notes
3: Adding new notes Adding a new note.
4: Delete Selected How to delete notes from the database.
5: The Notes edit area The bottom part of the program.
6: Configuring the program How to set another language.
7: Printing and Copying Notes to the Clipboard How to print notes.
8: Sending a Note to PeatFreak.com Submit a Note to this website.
9: Loading and Saving Database's How to load another database, or make a backup of your current database, etc.
10: Publishing a webpage showing your notes on the World Wide Web.
11: Updates see if the program has a update newer then your current installation.

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1: Viewing notes
Right under the logo you see the list view. In this window you will see all your tasting notes in the database. You can order them by clicking on the column. Clicking "Score" will order your notes starting on top with the highest score. Clicking "Distillery", "Expression" or "Comments" will order alphabetically on the contents of those columns, clicking a second time will reverse the order.
Selecting a line in the list will open the full tasting note in the notes field on the bottom half of the window. You can then edit a note if you would like to do that, and save it with "Save Changes".

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2: Filtering notes
Right under the list view you will see a text field. Here you can enter some text, and will have as result that only notes are shown which have the entered text in one of their fields. Note: those contain ALL fields, so not just the 4 fields shows in the list view. So to for example see all your Ardbeg notes, simply enter "Ardbeg" in this field. Or to see all notes you have from Signatory, enter "Signatory" here. Ofcourse you can order the results again by clicking the listview column names.
Please remind, it will search through all the data for the notes, not just the column names. This way you could also search for all notes you used descriptions such as "caramel" or list all notes with a percentage of 43%, etc. etc. Note that using filtering does not affect your database at all, it simply only shows any matching notes. If you want to see all your records again, simply click "Show All", or empty the text field.
You can use a space as a "wildcard". If you would type "ard 10", then the computer could come up with "ardbeg 10" as a match. Consequently, using "glen 10" could return a list of distillery names starting with "glen" with 10 year old expressions.

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3: Adding new notes
Click "New Note" if you want to add a new note. Using the bottom part of the window you can then fill in all details on your note, and store it in your database when clicking "Save Changes" on the bottom-right of the screen. On some configurations you might have to scroll down, or up, to select the "New Note" first.

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4: Delete Selected
Clicking this button will delete the selected note(s). Be careful, as gone is gone. Accidentally deleting a note is probably not something that will make your day, so be careful here. I have build in a little protection into the program to cover for human errors. When the program starts up, it will make a backup of your database, and put that backup in the program directory, named as "databasename.data.bak". Removing the .bak from the end gives you a workable database from before your last session.

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5: The Notes edit area
I will give a short run down on the different fields so you might have a clue on what to fill in:

Distillery: Here you fill in the name of the distillery. I also use this field to fill in the independent bottler if it is not a official distillery bottling. The "Search" button will open a webbrowser window with the contents of the distillery field as a search in the online database.
Score: here I put in a number which reflects my feeling the score should be for this whisky.
Percentage: should be clear, here you note down the ABV of the Whisky.
Expression: Here you fill in what the whisky is, like "standard 10 year old", or "French oak Finnish 12 year", etc. I also use this field to put in the distillery name in case its a independent bottling.
Date: Date of the tasting.
Bought at, and Price: should be self explanatory.
Colorbar: Here you can select the color that resembles the color of the Whisky. Enter a number in the textfield on the right of the bar between 1 and 100. The colorbar will be updated as you type. Tip: Hold your glass against something white on your computer-screen (the "Bought at" line for example in the program). This way you will always have the same lighting conditions, so your judgment of the color will not be different because of different lighting conditions).
Nose, Palate and Finnish: here describe the sensation on the nose, how the Whisky feels in the mouth and the finnish, so basically forming the actual tasting note.
Custom: as you guessed probably, this is a field you can give a name of yourself. From time to time I get a request to add for example a regions field, or a bourbon type field, etc. etc. This way I hope the program is customizable enough for all those who have specific wishes.
Comments: anything else you would like to store.

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6: Configuring the program (click the Config button on the bottom)
Name: If you would like to submit a Note tot he online database on this website, this will be the name that will be listed as the author.
Language: Please supply the name here you used to write the Note. Eventually I might want to add a option on the search page to only show Notes in a particular language.
E-mail: From time to time we get a lot of submitted tasting notes from someone who only filled in a distillery name and price for example. Hardly useful to anyone but to those heavily interested in the prices of malts! That's why we request you fill in your e-mail address here now. It will *only* be used to contact you in case of problems with your tasting note(s).
Custom Field Name: here you can fill in a name for the custom text field.

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7: Printing Notes or Copy Notes to the Clipboard
To print notes, simply click the button for each selected note you want to print out. Once you clicked all the notes you want to have printed out, click the button, and the notes will be printed out. A Notepad.exe window will flash shortly. Unfortunately there is not much I can do to prevent this (well, besides removing the function to print notes ;)).
Pressing the button will remove all selected notes for printing (press this if you made a mistake and want to start over again).

You can copy a Note to the Windows Clipboard by pressing , this will put the selected Note into the clipboard, after which you can paste it in a e-mail, or to a forum on the Internet, etc.

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8: Submitting Notes to PeatFreak.com
Looking through your own notes is cool enough, but how about comparing your notes to dozens of others from the same malt? Using the "Submit" button you can send the currently selected note to this site. In essence it would be the same as filling out the note submit form on this website. The more people submit their votes, the more useful this feature will be, so send in those notes!
Note that you must fill in your name and the language you use in your notes first on the configuration panel before you use this function (it will warn you if you haven't).

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9: Loading and Saving Databases
Database: Here you can see two icons to load and save your database. The first one is pretty straight forward. Simply click , and select the database you want to have open.
The button you can use to save the database. You can give it a new name, and/or save it in a new location for example to make a backup, etc. In other words, this works as a "Save as .." function you can find in all programs that handles with files. If you give it a new name please also note that this newly saved database will be the new database in the program. So if your intention was to make a backup, please load the "old" database right after.

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10: Publishing a webpage

Clicking the HTML button will generate a file named tastingnotes.html in the program's directory containing a list of all your tasting notes.. This file you can upload to your website, to share your notes with the visitors of your site.

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10: Check for new versions

Using the "Check Version" button you can check if there is a update available newer then your current installation. To do this, it will open a browser window, and visit a page on this website. It will not download or install anything, only inform you if there is a update available or not.

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