Creating Survey Files.

Before you can create a project or work with individual surveys you must have data files that contain the surveys you want to work with. If you have already entered the data from your surveys, you can use these files as the basis of your project.

You can also take surveys from existing files and use them to create a new survey file. You can do this using the survey copying capabilities of the Project Manager.

If you haven't entered your survey data into a file, the first step in creating a new project is to create a new survey file. You can create new survey files several ways. The easiest way is to use the Insert New Survey File in Project option. You can also create a new survey file by entering the data from individual surveys into the Survey Editor. If you want to create a new survey file this way, you need to run the editor manually. You can do this from the Project Manager by selecting the "Run|Run Editor Manually" option from the menu bar.

In Compass, any number of surveys can be placed into a data file. Files are used to keep different caves or parts of caves separate. For example, it is standard practice to put all the surveys from a small or medium sized cave into a single file. With larger caves, individual sections of the cave are generally placed in different files. In Compass, survey files have the extension ".DAT". For example, "GROANING.DAT" might contain all the data for Groaning Cave.