Using the MPL Help System

MPL offers the user an extensive help system containing useful information on how to use the MPL Modeling System. To access the help system choose the Topics command from the Help menu. You can also enter the help system by pressing the F1 key while running MPL. The help system dialog box contains three tabs; the Contents tab, the Index tab, and the Find tab, giving you different ways of accessing the help.

The Contents tab

The Contents tab shows all the available topics in the help system in a hierarchical tree structure. Each item shown as a book in the tree corresponds to a category or a section in the help while the items containing the actual help topics are represented by a page with a question mark on it.

You can double-click on any of the books to see all the topics available in that category or section. The MPL help system contains three main categories:

• The MPL Model Development Environment includes detailed information on how to use the MPL modeling environment, the available menu commands, the toolbar, and a description of all the options for each of the dialog boxes.
• The MPL Modeling Language contains a complete reference to the MPL language organized in the same way as the printed version of the manual.
• The MPL Tutorial contains multiple sessions with a series of models, gradually increasing in difficulty; in order to explain how to formulate linear programming models. This tutorial is specifically designed for teaching optimization modeling the way it is being applied in the corporate world.

You can continue opening books and browsing through the contents of the help until you locate a topic that looks useful.

You can print a topic by pressing the Print button at the bottom. If you want to print all the topics in a book, select it then press the Print button. Each topic will be printed on a separate page.

The Index tab

The Index tab enables the user to access a list of all the keywords in the help file or do a search for a specific keyword. The keyword list resembles a book index, with secondary entries indented beneath the primary entries.

As you type in a keyword, the list is automatically scrolled to match the characters typed against the primary entries in the list. If a word is not on the list, the user is taken to the word closest to where the word ought to be. Of course, you can still scroll through the keyword list and choose a word.

The Find tab

The Find tab enables the user to find a help topic by searching for a specific words or phrases in the text. The Find database is built the first time you select the Find tab through the Find Setup Wizard. The depth of the full-text search generated by the wizard is determined in the first wizard window. The recommended choice, Minimize Database Size, produces the smallest word list, while Maximize Search Capabilities gives the largest database and therefore the best search capabilities. You can further customize the search by pressing the Options button while in the Find tab.