Sharing functions with others

Opus makes it easy to share buttons and toolbars with your friends and other Opus users. For example, you might have developed a drop-down menu containing lots of useful rename commands - if you want to share this with someone, the easiest way is to use the clipboard.

In Customize mode, right-click on the button or the menu that you want to share, and choose Copy from the context menu.

At this point, you can exit Customize mode. The button or menu you copied remains on the clipboard, and you now need to get it into a form that you can give to someone else. There are two easy ways to do this:

• Use a text editor, like Notepad, to paste the clipboard contents into a new document (or, say, into an email that you're writing to someone)

• Paste the clipboard contents directly into a Lister (Edit / Paste) to create a new text file

Either way, this will convert the definition of the button into a text-based XML format that can be easily shared with someone.

When your friend gets the text-based button code, all they have to do to add it to their own toolbar is:

• Copy the button definition to the clipboard (by selecting all the text from the <?xml version="1.0"?> line down to the final </button> line and copying it to the clipboard).

• Set Opus into Customize mode.

• Paste the new button to their toolbar (right-click on the toolbar and choose Paste from the context menu - see Editing the Toolbar for more information).

You can copy an individual button, or a whole menu including all its child buttons (and any child menus it may have as well). You will often find people sharing toolbars and buttons on the Opus Resource Centre - see the Buttons & Scripts forum for lots of examples!