Updates

It has always been my policy to give free upgrades within a version. In other words, if you own version 4.0 and 4.2 is complete, just ask. I can make your file available here by doing some secret stuff or e-mail it to you. Because I truly believe that students should be given exactly what they earn, I fix any "undocumented features" (bugs) when they are found and post such happenings here. I also want you to be happy. It is my pleasure to hear from you and give you an upgrade.

Upgrades

Many of the "Features" listed below have been fixed in version 4.5   However, version 4.5 is retired.  I know you hate to say good-bye to an old friend, but tis so.   If you upgrade to PGGP 5 from PGGP 4, you will have to pay the upgrade price.

Undocumented Features

If you were to find that your copy of PGGP exhibits any of the "undocumented features" discussed below, please write to me. I will be pleased to give you the directions and password to download an upgrade.

If you find PGGP exhibits strange behavior or something that seems incorrect, let me know. I am not a good mind reader. I don't know how many times users have told me, "Oh, I noticed that, but PGGP saves me so much time, I just ignored it."

Don't ignore it. Let me fix it.

Boy, I hate these. But you know what they say: "If it's software, there's a bug."

8/19/2000 (Mis-Namin')

Windows did not have a fifth name format possibility: Printing Student ID in place of the Student Name. This has been corrected and free updates are available via the web. This caused a need for both Mac and Win to be changed slightly...so if you use both, you need both. Send me e-mail.

8/19/2000 (Mis-Behavin')

Window and Macintosh were starting up with Attendance off. This caused some users to not enroll students in the Attendance module. Not enrolling students caused behavior to misbehave. Both versions had the exact same problem. If you use both, you need both. Send me e-mail.

If you have this problem, send me e-mail.

8/19/2000 (Are We Dating...)

Windows 2000 altered the way Windows supplies the computer date to PGGP. If your dates are coming out something like 8/15/200 or 10/12/20 this is for you. This can cause Student Summaries to print without assignments. (Actually, if you waited 200 years, they would print just fine. Rather than make you wait, I have changed the way I format dates from Windows and am assuming this is fixed. Send me e-mail.

9/16/2000 (Gutter Talk)

The Macintosh version has reported some problems with the All Grades Report. It appears that even though Mac printers are "What You See Is What You Get", using PGGP with some printers you "Get What You Don't Want To See". The white space running down the page, in the middle, is sometimes called a gutter. If your grades are in the gutter, help is on the way. I have a solution...send me e-mail.

9/25/2000 (Want No Skills?) Everyone should read this one...all of it.

If you don't want Study Skills to print on the All Grades and Letter, you are now going to be a happy camper. All you must do go to Preferences and make sure Study Skills is not being used. The new installer will start with SS turned off, but you can simply open Preferences in the Settings Menu and close it and all will be well. Want this? The new installer includes this fix.

9.25/2000 (Gettin' SASI?)

If your district uses SASI to keep track of the kids, you can get files from SASI that will save typing in your class every year. (This has always been true, but I just made an adjustment that should make this even more foolproof.)

9/25/2000 (Bad Form?)

The Macintosh version had an extra line of code that was causing the second column of formulas to only allow one character, making it impossible to change the formula. It is fixed and you are welcome to the upgrade. Send me e-mail.

10/7/2000 (More Gutter Talk)

The Windows version, not to be outdone, has reported gutter problems. (You have to admire my consistency.) If your labels in the right column are too far to the left, I have a solution. Send me e-mail.

12/10/2000 (Short Number Talk- 4.1)

I had a user ask why the student ID number was only 6 characters. I said I didn't know. I looked and I had made room for 8 characters and then limited it to 6. We won't go into the reason I did this, as no one knows...especially me. I fixed the limiting function, and PGGP now lets you type in 8 characters. Please note that this actually changed the MacToWindows and WindowsToMac file size. Does that matter? Yes. If you use PGGP on both platforms, and upgrade...be sure to get an upgrade for both computers. Send me e-mail. BTW, this made PGGP 4.0 become 4.1...to keep you from being confused. I know. It is actually fairly confusing, anyway.

12/10/2000 (Talkin' Integers Now)

The Windows version did not like Effort Grades in a letter. This is because I unwittingly tried to see if what was being written were two or three characters, by checking to see if it was less than 100. When poor little Johnny got an N+, PGGP didn't know what number that was. It is fixed. Send me e-mail.

12/10/2000 (Don't Forget to Put Out The Data)

PGGP can now export final grade data to a standard database. If your district or school uses a central data system to keep track of student records, this feature can be a help.

2/6/2001 (Is This a Printout or a Checkerboard?)

PGGP, Mac, seems to be printing ugly black squares, instead of student names when Printing many of the reports on HP 800C series printers. This is most peculiar, as PGGP was heavily tested on HP printers. After a couple of months of testing, I am unable to find anything wrong with Mac PGGP print routines. I have discovered that if Color Sync is turned on in the print dialog, all is well. To turn on Color Sync Print any document. You need not be in PGGP. When the print dialog appears, click on General, on the upper left. When the menu appears, choose color. When the color dialog appears, put a check the Color Sync box, in the middle of the dialog. Last, click on Save.

5/15/01 (Lately Late Is Latent)

PGGP, Mac, (lately) has was stubborn about marking an score late. If the cell was blank, you couldn't mark it late until it held a score. Well, that was not good, so I fixed it. Let me know if this one has been bugging you...lately.

7/28/01 (Déjä Vu, Over and Over)

PGGP, Win, was had a problem in behavior when using the Percentage Method. Each visit to Attendance was resetting all behavior columns, past column one, to 100% in Behavior. Most PGGP users were using the Percentage Method to set a single column of behavior and this went unreported until now. An alert user has pointed this out to me, and it has been repaired. If this has been a problem for you, let me know.

10/9/01 (Can't Get There From Here)

PGGP, Mac, has had an annoying habit of skipping the "Entered By # Wrong" field when setting up an assignment using the Number Wrong method. Alert users have tried hitting Tab, only to find out that even the Tab skips the "Entered By # Wrong" edit field. Well I chased that one down. Now, when you enter an assignment by Number Wrong or Number Correct, you will find the cursor happily waiting for you to enter the number of problems. If this has been a problem for you, let me know.

2/25/02 (Attend-ing to Problems)

PGGP Win had a strange glitch that caused the printed Attendance pages to: 1) have the percent sign next to the days Tardy and 2) have Assignment Slots at the bottom. Add a couple of heading problems and a misguided line between the column number and the date and the printout was less than satisfactory. It satisfies me to be able to report that the report is now much more satisfying.

3/11/02 (Lost in the Background)

PGGP Mac had an another (see 2/6/01) interesting problem when hooked to the 800 series HP Deskjet printers. When printing All Letters, sometimes less than half the letters printed. The PGGP screen said they were printing but when they printed, letters were skipped indiscriminately. A clever PGGP user found that turning off Background Printing fixed this problem. So if you have had this problem, give it a try.

2/1/03 (More Déjä Vu) See 7/28/01

 PGGP, Mac has shown up with the same problem found in PGGP, Win. The problem was in behavior when using the Percentage Method. Each visit to Attendance or Printing a Summary was resetting all behavior columns, past column one, to 100% in Behavior. Most PGGP users were using the Percentage Method to set a single column of behavior and this went un-reported until now. Another alert user has pointed this out to me, and it has been repaired. If this has been a problem for you, let me know. (As I have said before, it is nice to know that when I ported PGGP from Mac to Win, I did a complete job, bugs and all...)

8/12/03 (To Summarize) Well humph!

PGGP Mac showed up with a hard to find problem in the Student Summary report. If you have several subjects and if you changed the order of the subjects, and if you had enough assignments so that one of the subjects (for which you changed the order) went over a page break...then the grade and percentage in the header on the next page were for the wrong subject. (That sentence is like a computer program!) An alert user sent a message and I printed a tree trying to make it happen. Finally he sent me a pdf of the report and bingo. Makes me crazy. Anyway, if you want the fix...send a note.

8/26/03 (To the Head of the Class) All Grades Report

This is not really a bug, but a further explanation. As more of us get and use laser printers, we find funny stuff from time to time. When printing All Grades, on some lasers, more than 4 pages are printed. The symptom is that at the bottom of the first page part of the last child's grades are missing, and the missing grades appear alone on the next page. There are two ways to fix this. In Page Setup, you can change from US Letter Small to US Letter. Or you can go to Settings, Preferences and click the Printer Margins. Put a negative number in the top margin. I would start with a -1 or -2 and work from there.

2/10/05 (Language Misunderstandings) Windows Student Database

After all this time, would you believe that the student database is giving false information about a student's language if the class has been alphabetized? I think the reason this was not discovered earlier, is that the database receives what the user puts in just fine, but upon return, it shows the wrong information. If you use Windows and if you sort your class you may want the fix for this. Just write.

3/28/06 (Semester Average was a Mess-ter Average) Mac 4.5 for OS X,

Well, this one wasn't fun. Mac was in Beta Testing for months and months and the Semester Average was broken. PGGP 4.5 for Mac was not averaging the two classes. It was printing the grades of what ever class was open before the Semester Average. This is George's nightmare...that PGGP actually put out bad grades. Being as not one person in the almost 100 testing PGGP for OS X caught this, apparently not many use Semester Average. This was introduced to the public in late August, 2006. It probably was not on CD's until perhaps October. (Katrina makes it hard to pin down this change as Staz Software took a direct hit from Katrina.) If you use Mac and Semester average, write to George.

04/12/06 (Do You Put Any Effort In This?) Win

Win version was not taking INC and Late papers in to account when averaging Effort Grades. This meant that the first column of the Academic Effort Formula was being ignored. This has been fixed. If you want a fix, write to George.

04/17/06 (Maybe We Should Just Exclude This) 4.5 Win to Mac and Mac To Win

The 4.5 upgrade was not transferring subjects excluded from the GPA correctly between Mac and Win. This shows up in GPA averaging and Study Skills averaging. It is fixed. Write if you want this fix. If you are not using 4.5, you need this upgrade. It is has some pretty handy features.

04/18/06 (Are You Part of the Group, or Not?) 4.5 Win

The 4.5 Win was doing strange things if you tried to set up groups for cooperative learning. Fixed.

04/19/06 (What Do You Mean, the Names Don't Match) Win

Sometimes, in Semester Average, Win PGGP 4.5 said the names didn't match...and they did. It was being a little over cautious. Fixed.

09/16/06 (One Is A Small Number) Win

Win 4.5, for a few weeks, had a glitch in assignments entered by percentage. When you returned to the Grade Entry Page, it was as if each student had only one correct. The percentages remained correct, unless you moved from cell to cell. This should not have been on CDs shipped from Staz Software after 4/18/06. However PGGP customers that were updating may have a copy with this oddness.  

01/02/07 (How Round is Round) Win

Between 4/19/06 and 9/12/6, PGGP Win began to round the Semester average twice, making it possible for a Student with 89.0% and 89.0% to receive a 90.0% on the semester average.  (rounding to the ones place basically adds 0.5 to a number)  My records show the CD's were mastered on 4/18/06.   Free updates via the web may contain this error.  Fixed.  

03/19/07 (Late Late Fix)  A Win inconvenience.

Somewhere in the development of PGGP 5 for standards, the Win version of PGGP quit marking an assignment late when ctrl-Enter was hit in the Main Grade Grid.   Sorry about that.  Fixed.

05/05/07 (Was Correct and Wrong Correct or Wrong?)   Win

There was some nonsense with Number Correct and Number Wrong in Windows.   Not sure what it was about, but clicking back to the Grade Entry gave some pretty peculiar numbers.   Windows seems to have been making a small mistake (in favor of students) on some Correct and Wrong calculations.   I can find no copies that actually do this, only the data files displaying this oddness.  I am not sure this was ever a version that went to users, but some of my test files from September '06 displayed the error.

07/05/07 (Obsessed with English)   Win

This was weird.   The Windows version renamed the 10th subject English when you clicked the second tab of the translation tables.   Just too weird.   Version 5 fixes this.   

07/Sometime/07  (Toolbox Not Found Error) Mac.   If you have an Intel Mac and have not upgraded since spring of 2007 click here: Toolbox Missing Error

08/06/08  (Behavior was not Behaving)  Win

When in Behavior or Attendance and trying to go to the Grade Entry Screen, there was a range error.  This made me fairly grumpy as I found it days after weeks of testing for the release of PGGP 5.  

09/22/07 (Mac Tools Needed) Mac

If you purchased a Mac in mid 2007 you may have a problem running PGGP.   When PGGP starts it says there are Toolbox items missing and this is followed by a crash.  This is not really a bug in PGGP but rather a bug in newer copies of OX 10.4.10    There is a fix for this problem.   Feel free to write and ask more questions.   To read more about this Toolbox issue click:   Tool Box Fix

04/02/08 ( Don't Mix My Standards)  Win

PGGP was copying standards when pasting an assignment column copied from another location.  This turns out to be a bad idea, as it is seldom you want the a Writing standard copied to Number Sense.  

08/27/08 (What Are You Doing Here)  Mac

Oops.  An experimental column being used in a test crept into the Report Card Time Window.  It wasn't doing anything but it was confusing... so it went away.  While I was at it there was a rare Import menu problem when importing a district prepared class list that was fixed.

09/18/09 (There is No Percentage in This)  Win

An alert user pointed out that the percentages were missing in one of the two columns of Grade Entry when you returned to an assignment.  Fixed.

10/24/09 (Disappearing Act)  Win

A school in Northern California noticed that standards attached to some assessments would disappear.  The standard's location in the menu was even blank.  Then later, as if by magic, they would be back.  This one required an all nighter... well a 3 AM-er and didn't get fixed.  We couldn't even figure out how to make it happen let alone make it stop happening.  After four hours of sleep I was looking at a routine for the zillionth time and duh, there it was.  Fixed.

10/24/09 (Double Click Trouble) Win

About the time the above problem was showing its ugly head, a teacher a thousand miles away could not open a Report Card Template file by double clicking on the file sent in e-mail.  Fixed.

04/16/10 (Mystery of the Missing Window)  Win

Vista computers sometimes did not display the Grade Entry Screen after putting in assignment information when starting a new assignment.  With the advent of Windows 7 the Grade Entry Screen rarely appeared.  This was a tough one to chase as sometimes all worked well.  Fixed.

04/16/10 (A Comment on Comments)  Win & Mac   

A teacher found she could not upload her report cards for printing.  It turns out that the file parser didn't like an "&" anywhere in the file.  Who would have thought?  Apparently, not me.   So, now you will have to write "and" instead of & when putting comments in report cards.  Fixed.

07/30/11 (Where's The Standard?)  Win

In Windows, the letter omitted some of the standard titles when including a Standards chart in the letter.  The standard chart always had a range of five descriptors rather than the number of descriptors the user selected in the Rubric Formula.  Fixed.

07/03//11 (Developers? Developers? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Developers."

Apple released System 10.7 and it does not support the Carbon Library. Of course that means nothing to most of you but to PGGP it means that it will not operate on System 10.7, Lion. I would be lyin' (get it?) if I didn't say this makes me a bit grumpy. But, there it is. PGGP would have to be rewritten pretty much from the ground up. So... Not Fixed. (Of course the Windows version of PGGP is still running fine.)

 Do all these improvements mean that PGGP is flakey? Well, I don't think so. I think all software has bugs. (PGGP for Mac is around 24,000 lines of code.  PGGP for Windows is over 30,000 lines.)  The difference is that some developers admit and fix problems as soon as they are uncovered, and other developers pretend the problem is not there or tell the user to wait until the next release...which of course must be purchased. *smile*

 If you would like to talk to George, you can call 530-346-6038.

   

      

         
Home
      
      

         
Write
         to George