AsTeRICS Grid Dynamic Communicator
17 – Main menu – Manage grids and backups
Grid details
The Manage Grids section in the Main Menu allows you to manage all the grids in your communicator: display all the grids, create new grids, delete grids, create backups, activate the global grid, etc., among other functions.
At the top right, we have the button to create a new grid and the More button, whose options are explained at the end of this tutorial.
At the bottom of the active grid, we find different options: Show, Edit, Clone, Delete, Export and Save as PDF of the current grid.
All of them are common options, although we can highlight the option to Export the current grid. This option also appears when you click the More button, so we will explain it at the end of the tutorial.
The Save as PDF option allows you to save the grid(s) in this format. In this way, we can have a printed version of our grid(s) with the same options with which it is configured.
As we can see in the screenshot, we can download only the current grid or we can that are linked to this grid, even Insert the link between pages of all the linked grids. We can also print the background color (of the cells) and print the index on the side.
Our initial recommendation is that you perform different tests by saving in PDF format to check what happens using the different options. The most common of these will be to Print the background color, as in the following screenshot.
Grid list
At the bottom of the current grid, we find the Grid list of our communicator. In this list, we can visualize all the user’s grids and we can use three options:
- show All grids,
- show the Grids connected with “Home-board” or
- show the Not reachable grids.
We can also Sort by label (alphabetically) and Sort by number of connections. Usually, we will use the first option more frequently.
At the bottom right of the grids, there is an icon with three dots that allows us to perform the same actions that we explained in the previous section of the Grid Details.
Global Grid
At the bottom of the page, we find the options for the Global Grid. Although we have explained it in the previous chapter, we repeat it again.
In this section we can .
We can also Activate, Edit or Reset the Global Grid to default. Remember that this grid is the one that appears behind the communication grids and shows the cumulative phrase (collect element), together with the different actions related to that phrase.
More button
Finally, we have the possibility to perform another series of actions by clicking on the More button, located at the top right.
These actions are summarized as follows:
1- Create a New Grid.
2- Save backup of the entire communicator “Save backup to file” : allows you to save a backup of the active user and export it to another device. In this case, a file called asterics-grid-backup.grd is automatically downloaded, which we can rename to more easily identify the contents of the copy.
Note that when we import the backup, all the communicator boards we have in the user will be deleted.
This option is interesting to always have an updated backup of all our users.
3- Save custom data to file: allows you to save a backup copy of a board and even the linked boards. In this option, you can customise the data to be exported.
- Select grid: allows you to select whether you want to export a specific dashboard or all the available grids.
- Export languages: if you are working with a communicator with several languages we can export all the languages in which the communicator is translated or only one of them.
- Export dictionaries: it is recommended to activate this option if you are going to import the copy on a computer without an Internet connection, as the inclusion of dictionaries increases the size of the backup copy. It is easier to install the necessary dictionaries at the moment we import the copy in each of the devices we use.
- Export user and input configuration: this option should be activated when you want to create a backup copy of a specific communicator for a specific user, as it preserves the communicator and cell color settings, text transformation, content language or input settings (scanning or direct selection). If we want to create a more neutral copy that is valid for different users, we do not activate this option.
- Export global grid: it is advisable to activate this option if we use the global dashboard and we want to keep the default configuration or the one we have been able to customise it with when restoring the copy. If we do not use the global grid or plan to create different global grids on the devices on which we restore it, we will not activate it.
4- Save grids to PDF: allows you to save the current board or all the boards in this format for later printing.
5- Restore backup from file: this option allows us to import a backup with the .grd extension on our device. When importing, the application warns us that all the current configuration will be replaced by the backup we are restoring.
6- Import custom data from file: allows you to import the file with the copy of personalised data that we have saved with the option explained above.
First, select the backup file (.grd) to be imported by clicking on Select file. Once selected, the system informs us of the data contained in this copy (58 grids, 1 dictionary and the user and input configuration). If necessary, we can enable or disable the import of the dictionary or user settings.
By checking the Delete existing data before import option, we will do a clean restore without preserving the existing configuration (as the Restore backup option does). If not checked, the new imported grids will be added to the existing ones in the configuration.
7- Reset to default configuration: allows you to completely delete the current configuration and return to the communicator access screen where you can create a new communicator, import a predefined communicator or import a backup copy.
