To use NDAD effectively you need to be familiar with using a web browser, the computer keyboard and your mouse. Most of the system and
its documentation assumes a basic level of familiarity with these concepts. You need to know:
How to move back and forward between pages
How to use your browser's scroll bars to view pages which are larger than your browser's window
How to make your browser open more than one window at once
If you are not familiar with these tasks and concepts, we recommend that you ask a friend or colleague to explain them to you, or
obtain some self-paced teaching such as an instructional book or video on the use of the World Wide Web. In the UK, you can obtain
information about courses in basic computer skills from your local library, or from Learndirect .
Software
NDAD has been designed to be used on any popular graphical web browser, and has also been tested on text based browsers. For best
results, we recommend you use recent browser versions, such as:
Internet Explorer version 6 or later
Netscape version 7 or later
Mozilla version 1.0.1 or later
Opera version 6 or later
The website will also function on older browsers such as Internet Explorer versions 4/5, or Netscape Communicator versions 4/6, though
you may experience some deterioration in the appearance. We make every effort to avoid using functions specific to any particular
browser or manufacturer and do not require the use of any special plug-ins, however some advanced features of the website require a
Javascript-enabled browser.
To make full use of NDAD, your browser will need to be able to accept a cookie. More information on cookies
is available.
Hardware
For viewing all parts of the site other than the dataset documentation and the archives themselves, any system capable of running your
browser should be sufficient. The main demands made on your browser will be in viewing the following types of pages:
Field-level catalogues, for tables with more than 50 or so fields
Dataset documentation
Data in tables
Older computers, or those without much memory, may take a long time to process large pages and display them on your screen. You can
improve the speed of display of data tables by choosing a smaller number of rows or columns to view at a time.
The dataset documentation viewer requires your browser to display relatively large images. Older PCs will take significantly longer to
display these, and memory again makes a difference. In this case, you can improve the speed with which images are viewed by choosing a
lower resolution for each image. Attempting to view images at high resolutions - above 50% of real size - can crash machines with very
limited resources, and will certainly result in long delays whilst your machine struggles to format the image for display.
Help
