Category Archives: FAQ

Key commands

What are the key commands I can use on the main view level?

Pressing m you can switch on and off the menu

The key b switches on and off the toolbar

With s the statusbar at the bottom is shown or hidden

Both the toolbar and the window frame and caption can be hidden or shown pressing p (presentation mode). If you switch off the menu and the statusbar as well and the SCOUT window is maximized, the whole screen is filled with the main view

If you have a configuration which is configured to perform a parameter fit, you can start and stop the fit pressing the f key.

Pressing e opens the list of view elements of the view which is currently displayed.

The automation timer can be started and stopped with t.

In order to setup a new configuration or to modify an existing one, press F7 to switch from the main view level to the treeview level.

Strange keyboard

Suddenly my keyboard behaves rather strange. What happened?

When you use mouse actions to re-size view elements you have to press simultaneously the Shift and the Alt key. As long as you really move the mouse nothing happens.

However, pressing Shift-Alt without mouse movement switches the keyboard layout to another language, like from English to German or Chinese. Since your keyboard hardware is still the same pressing some keys may cause surprising output. If you observe this, press Shift-Alt again until you are back at the wanted keyboard language. The current keyboard layout is indicated on the right end of the Windows taskbar (EN for English, DE for German, …).

Missing status bar

The main window used to have a panel at the bottom with several control elements and labels. Where is it?

When the software displays the main view, pressing the key ‘s’ switches the status bar on or off. Maybe you accidentally pressed this key. Do it again and the status bar will appear again.

The visibility of the status bar is saved in the program’s configuration files. When you load a configuration, the status bar might eventually disappear, depending on the settings in the file.

No window frame

The program window does not have any frame any more. What should I do?

Very likely you have pressed the key ‘p’ on your keyboard which turns the software into the so-called presentation mode. In presentation mode the window frame is suppressed.

Press ‘p’ again and the frame will come back.

Windows 10

Will the software run under Windows 10?

Yes, our software products run under Windows 10.

We recommend the following: Since Windows 10 carefully watches the folder ‘Programs’ (or however this folder is called in your language) it will ask you for permission to write or modify files in that folder. This can be very annoying because our software products frequently write to files in their folders and subfolders (the database, for example, and the passport file). For this reason we recommend to install the software outside the program folder – you can use, for example, a folder like c:\my_software\.

Licence information

When I start the software I get the message ‘Licence information for TF1Book is invalid’. What should I do?

In our products we used to work with a workbook component named TF1Book. This is replaced now by a more modern workbook component supporting Unicode characters and Excel files, but the software still contains the TF1Book component in order to be able to read old configuration files.

TF1Book is a so-called ActiveX control which sits in the file vcf132.ocx. During the installation, this file is copied to the program directory and the setup program then registers the ActiveX component using the windows program regsvr32. You will get the above mentioned error message if another software package registers an older version of vcf132.ocx. This happens even if the other program copied its version of vcf132.ocx to a totally different directory. Due to the registration Windows will start the wrong version of the component when our software needs to generate the workbook component.
In this case you should unregister all older versions of the component and work with the latest version only. You unregister an ActiveX component with a command like
regsvr32 “c:\program files\software_xyz\vcf132.ocx” /U
where the specified path should be the installation path of the software package that uses the older version of the component. When all older versions are un-registered, you should register the latest version with the command
regsvr32 “c:\program files\scout\vcf132.ocx”

Missing DLL

Trying to start the program I get an error message saying that a DLL is missing. What can I do to solve this issue?

You have probably upgraded your program to a version which needs more DLLs than your previous program version. We add DLLs (dynamic link libraries) if new software packages have been included in the software, probably to support new spectrometer hardware or mathematical routines.

In order to get going you should download the DLL package from our website and copy all files to your program directory (the files are packed in a zip-file). Please start on www.whteiss.com, go to ‘Support’ and then to ‘Download DLL package’.

Object version

I get the message ‘Error: Object version in file younger than in program version!’. What does this mean?

You are trying to open a configuration which has been generated with a higher version of the software. The program refuses to load the file because this will contain objects which are not supported by your version.

There are 2 solutions: Update your program to the latest version so that you are able to read the file, or ask the producer of the file to generate a version for you which uses the object generation that you have in your software. You can find out about your program version in the ‘About box’ (menu item ?/about).

No valid dongle

When I try to start the software I get the message ‘No valid software protection key (dongle) found!’. Why?

Our software packages are protected by so-called dongles. A dongle is a small USB device (looks like a memory stick) which must be present in one of the USB ports of the PC in order to run the software. If you get this message the dongle has not been detected – very likely it is really not there.