Little Logbook Help

Little Logbook

Little Logbook is a view and extraction program for the FSX logbook. It allows fast and intuitive search and grouping of logbook entries based on several parameters, as well as export to HTML and CSV documents.

Additional information about airports can be shown together with the MakeRunways Utility by Peter Dowson.

Little Logbook has not been tested with Prepare3d or FSX SE.

Installation

An installer or setup program is not available.

Do not extract the archive into the folder c:\Program Files\ or c:\Program Files (x86)\ since you will need administrative privileges in some Windows versions. Since Windows keeps control on these folders other problems might occur, like replaced or deleted files.

Extract the Zip archive into a folder, like c:\Own Programs\Little Logbook. Then start the program by double-clicking littlelogbook.exe.

Little Logbook is a 32-bit application and was tested with Windows XP, Windows 7 64-bit and Windows 8.1 64-bit.

First Start

When started the first time the program tries to find the file Logbook.BIN and to load this file into an internal database. A file selection dialog will appear, if the file couldn't be found.

The program remembers the selected logbook file. If Little Logbook finds the file to be changed on startup, it will reload it into the internal database.

MakeRunways Utility

Optionally install and run the MakeRunways Utility by Peter Dowson to create the file runways.xml in the FSX base directory. This allows to show and search for additional airport information.

Additional information that can be shown in the table view, is airport name, city, state and country. More information is available as a tooltip in the from and to ICAO field.

Airport Tooltip

Picture above: Airport information that will be shown when runways.xml has been loaded.

If the file runways.xml was found and loaded, it will be checked for changes and reloaded on demand.

The MakeRunways utility can be downloaded from Peter Dowsons page. Follow the installation instructions in the included readme file.

Menu

File

Open Logbook ...

Open Logbook

Opens another Logbook.BIN file and loads it into the internal database. Little Logbook remembers the file and will reload it if it has changed.

Reload Logbook

Reload Logbook

Reloads the previously selected Logbook.BIN file into the internal database.

Quit

Exits the program after an question dialog which can be optionally disabled.

View

Toolbar Statusbar, Statistics and Search

Shows or hides the respective windows or bars. Little Logbook keeps track of these settings.

Show All

Show All Entries

The table view does not show all logbook entries initially. This menu item allows to load and show all entries. Only a part of the entries is shown again after a search filter is modified or the sort order is changed.

The number of all, visible and selected entries is shown in the status bar.

Reset View

Reset View

Resets the sort order, the column order and column widths back to the default view after showing a question dialog.

Reset Search

Reset Search

Deletes all search filters and shows all logbook entries again in the table view. See below for information about search filters.

Ungroup

Ungroup

A previously grouping is released and the tables view goes back to the normal view. See below about grouping.

Export

Either all or only the selected logbook entries can be exported.

Open Document after Export

All exported files will be opened in a suitable application, if this menu item is checked. A web browser is used for HTML documents and Excel or LibreOffice Calc for CSV documents.

Export All as CSV ...

Export Selected as CSV ...

The CSV export writes all columns in the same order independent of the view. This behavior differs from the HTML export.

The field separator is ; and " is used to mark text. The used codepage depends on the operating system settings. For western European Windows it is often Windows-1252. For Mac and Linux UTF-8.

Export All as HTML ...

Export All as HTML ...

The HTML export creates the exported document with the same column order and sorting, as shown in the current table view. This also applies to grouped views.

Columns that are resized to the minimum width are not exported. This is a way to design the exported document to a limited extent.

Note that too large files can result in long loading times or can even crash the browser. Therefore, the number of entries should be limited below 5,000 log entries by a search filter or a selection.

Extras

Reset all Messages

All dialogs that have been turned off with Do not show this Dialog again check-box will be shown again.

Help

Contents

Shows this help.

About

Displays information about Little Logbook.

About Qt

Displays information about the Qt Toolkit used for programming.

Search Filter

All filters can be used in parallel. The search filters can be linked with an and and an or condition.

If the runways.xml of MakeRunways Utility file was not loaded, some search fields are hidden.

Searchbar

Picture above: filters that are displayed when the file runways.xml was found.

Searchbar without runways.xml

Picture above: The reduced search bar when runways.xml was not found.

Tooltip Help

A short tooltip help about searching is available above the labels From: and End:.

Tooltips

Search Patterns

The standard search filters for terms in the logbook that begin with the entered text.

The wildcard * stands for any text. Once a * is included in the term, the standard search is no longer used.

If the first character in a search box is a - that search is negated (find all entries , that do not match).

Search Conditions

The setting in this combo box defines how the the search filters are to be linked.

Conditions

Search Examples

Complex Search

Picture above: Search for all flights with the Beech Duke starting in Bella Coola that do not have a destination in the USA (K-region).

Table View

The table view has two views:

Grouped View

Picture above: The table view is grouped by plane description and sorted by number of the flights in descending order to find the most flown aircraft.

Header

The header of the table view allows the following manipulations:

The program remembers the column widths and positions until Reset View is executed.

Header

Picture above: The gaps between from airport and from country were reduced to minimum size. They are therefore excluded from the HTML export.

Columns

The following columns are displayed in normal view:

* These columns are only available when the runways.xml of MakeRunways Utility file has been loaded.

Statusbar

The status bar displays the total number of entries, the number of visible entries and selected logbook entries in the table view.

Statusbar

Context Menu

Certain items in the context menu of the table view are not always available. You cannot create any grouping by flight time for example, because no meaningful result can be expected.

Context Menu

Reset View, Reset Search und Show All

The function of these menu items is identical to those on the View menu.

Filter by Entries including / excluding Text

Takes the text of the field under the cursor and sets the search filter for an including or an excluding search.

Group by Column or Ungroup

Allows grouping by a column. All the same values ​​in this column will be combined and the totals for other columns will be shown.

Thus, e.g. a grouping by aircraft description, the number of flights and total flight time will be displayed for each aircraft type.

To return to the normal view, select the menu item Ungroup.

Statistics

This displays information about the entire logbook. The contents of this view can be copied as formatted text and then inserted into documents or web pages.

The statistics window is a so-called dock window, which can be docked in the main window at different locations or even be removed from the main window.

Statistics

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

GPL V3