VA, opening saved files

[Craig Bumgarner]

Feeling kinda stupid here, can't figure out how to open saved files in VA 9.06. I used to do this all the time but stopped using VA 4-5 years ago and have forgotten. Can anyone enlighten me on this?

[johnparchem]

If you want to open a .tee file (waveform) On the bottom right hand control panel, I select the more tab and then spectrum.

va file open.JPG (23.21 KiB) Viewed 11572 times

[Craig Bumgarner]

Thanks John, I’m running 9.06 and I see you are running VA 2011. In 9.06, the are only two tabs on the control box in the lower right corner. One is Main, the other is More Options, but when I open More Options, all I get is a Frequency Compensation condolence box.

[Craig Bumgarner]

Here are screen shots of the lower right control panel and the panel I get when I click More Options tab
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Screen Shot 2019-07-31 at 4.24.45 PM.png (104.67 KiB) Viewed 11562 times

[johnparchem]

Whoops,

you can always hit the capture spectrom button and after the buffer fills it will open a window that should allow you to open a file. That is one of the ways I get a window.

[Craig Bumgarner]

When I do that, the Open File shows as Open File (not available) and no amount of clicking gets it done. I wonder if this is because I am running VA under on a Mac via Parallels.

[Trevor Gore]

VA 9.0.6 doesn't save files that are re-openable in VA. It just saves a .txt file that can be used in Excel (or similar) and a .wmf file which is just a picture of whatever was on your screen when you hit save. The files cannot be re-loaded into VA and be zoomed etc. so you can read peaks.

If you want to re-load files you need to use one of the later versions of VA, like John is doing, and he will be able to advise you on how to do that. I don't think you get full functionality like you do on a just-produced plot, though, but John will hopefully advise you on that.

If I need to check peaks etc. on old files I just look them up in the text file (double click on it and it will open in NotePad or some similar app in you emulation system), or if I want to examine a particular plot in detail (doesn't happen often) I load the .txt file into Excel and re-plot it in Excel. That's how I do composite plots, by loading multiple .txt files and plotting them together. I like the ease-of-use of v9.0.6 over the later versions, all of which I have tried. I don't feel I'm missing much by not being able to re-load files into VA. There are open office spreadsheet programs similar to Excel if you don't want to purchase a copy of MS Office.

[Craig Bumgarner]

Thanks Trevor, yep, that's the problem. I guess I was using VA 2011 before and didn't realize 9.06 would not view files. I'm now using 9.06 because we could not get the Frequency Meter in 11 to work at the workshop. I downloaded the executable only VA 2011 version and it works fine for viewing saved .tee files and does not seem to interfere with the "installed" version 9.06.