Review Of Woods Of The World CD ROM

Anyone who owns a personal computer, whether he/she is a professional woodworker, amateur, hobbyists, or just has an interest in wood, should own this CD. This program contains most comprehensive collection of information on many of the worlds species of woods.
Woods of the World is designed to run almost entirely from CD. For best performance, the program should be run on a computer with a minimum speed of 60 MHz (any Pentium or Mac PowerPC would serve well) and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive. Your monitor must be able to display at least 256 colors. If you have a slower computer, you can move several files from the CD to hard disk. This will substantially speed up operation of the program.
The program is very graphical and user friendly. When you start the program, it brings you to the Command Screen. In the uppermost top left hand corner there is an icon of a tree. Clicking on this icon enables you to change the appearance of the screen, you are given options to show menu bar, show standard zoom window or show full screen. If you wish to minimize the program, cut, copy or paste some info, you must use the standard zoom window.
Most of the user’s initial research is done from the Command Screen. It displays a plethora of options.
Below the menu bar, there are four boxes that constantly change (about every 10 seconds) showing you the names pictures of woods and composite materials. To the left of these boxes, you are given four search options. Woods can be located by Genus name, Species name, Common names or Region/Country.
At the bottom of the screen is the Work List, a key part of the program. As each species is located and selected, it is then added to this list. The list will show the I.D. number of the wood, Genus and Species Name as well as any criteria matches. Once you have added a wood to the work list, you can then click on it and a picture of that wood will appear to the left of the list. After a wood has been selected in the work list box, a report can be generated. The reports screen will enable you to generate either a full or partial report on the wood you have selected. Options include, gathering all information, common values, common uses, numerical values, physical and environmental profiles, species distribution, or a complete species list. You also are able to print most of the information that is shown on the screen.

The program offers many other features, some of which are; kiln (drying) schedules for many woods, lists of non-solid wood products, sources, furniture companies, certification organizations, wood based recycled products and a glossary. A feature that I found very useful is one that lets you compare ten different woods simultaneously by appearance. Along with these are various maps, pictures, tables, and micrographs of many woods and to top it off, 13 different short video clips on subjects like drying wood, manufacturing veneer and plywood, sawmilling, furniture making and others.

One should have little if not any trouble learning how to use this program thanks to an excellent design that is very graphical and user friendly. However, if needed comprehensive and extensive help area can be accessed by clicking on the Help button on the main control bar shown at the top of most screens (the button with the question mark on it). This Help area should be reviewed the first time you start up the program. There is an option in that area to print all the Help material.
This will give you the equivalent of a printed manual. Help is also provided on nearly every screen by examining the messages that come up along the bottom of each screen as you move the mouse over various fields, buttons, and other objects. There also is a PREFERENCES screen where you can learn how to optimize the speed of the program, set the program so data can be changed and/or added to, or configure the program to run entirely from hard disk.

Woods Of The World for Mac or Windows retails for $99.00. You will get a special discount if you order on-line and provide your discount code, which is WWW111.

Woods Of The World CD is produced by:

Tree Talk, Inc.
PO Box 426, 431 Pine Street
Burlington, VT 05401

800-858-6230
802-863-6789
802-863-4344 fax
E-mail: wow@together.net

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