Overview

The VB ELF On-Line Help is broken up into two documentation sections. The first, Topics, gives a subject-by-subject view of the different logical components of the program. This is a good way to start getting acquainted with the software.

The following section is a Form By Form listing of features, tips, tricks and gotchas. These pages are the destinations for the Web Help feature of VB ELF. For instance, if you submit a query in Worksheet mode, then click on the Help button of the VB ELF toolbar, you'll be taken directly (via your Web Browser) to the Worksheet.htm help page in our "Form By Form" documentation section.

Click on the "+" symbol in the tree in the left panel to open a Table of Contents for either of these two sections.

VB ELF itself also consists of two main sections, the Analysis functions and the Query functions. The general way VB ELF works is as follows. You install the software onto your hard drive. This is, of course, a one-time operation.

For each database that you want to use VB ELF with, you need to create a natural language interface. To do this, you must choose the database using the Select Database button on the VB ELF toolbar. Then click the toolbar's Analyze button, select your choices for the Analysis, and let the process complete. Once it's done, the Query window opens automatically, and you can begin asking questions in natural English.

Each time you start VB ELF, the most recently used database will have its interface loaded automatically. You can decide to rerun the Analysis at any time, with or without selecting new settings. But it's only necessary to do this if
a) you change the database structures, or
b) you add text data, which may appear directly in questions typed into the Query window

This means that if you add new customers to your database every day, and need to ask questions about them directly by name (for example, "Show products ordered by John Smith), then you'll need to rerun the analysis frequently. In this case, you should spend some time learning how to speed up Analyses by including only those tables and fields which are essential.

But if you rely mostly on queries that mention "generic" data (for example, "Show products ordered by California customers") or queries that don't mention specific database entries at all (for example, "How many customers in each country placed orders in 1998?"), then you'll be able to run Analyses less frequently.

See the Analyze topic for more information on settings, options, synchronization of the database, and other subjects.