The Advanced Installer main window is organized into five sections: Ribbon (or Main Menu plus toolbar), left pane page menu, page display and info pane. Each page may in turn be organized in multiple tabs and/or dialog boxes. Most dialog boxes can be resized by dragging their bottom-right corner.
Ribbon
Starting with Advanced Installer 9 on
Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update or higher,
the ribbon control replaces the combined
functionalities of the main menu and toolbar.
Toolbar
The toolbar allows quick access
to most commands provided by the menu system. From here you can create
projects, existing ones
or , and
the project you are working on. Some of the
creation process' pages append their own toolbars to easily add files
to the install, create shortcuts, etc. For a detailed explanation of
each item on the main toolbar see Working with Projects.
Left Pane
The left pane page menu
contains grouped lists of conceptually related pages: Product Information, Requirements, Resources, Deployment, User Interface, System Changes, Server, Custom Behavior. From
general to detailed, clicking on these items will display, to the
right, the various configuration options for your installer. The
currently selected item is displayed in bold.
You can toggle the left pane page menu on and off from the “View > Show > Left Pane” menu. Customize it to display the desired groups or group elements from the “Add/Remove” option located in left pane's bottom-right side. The size of the icons and elements can also be changed by selecting the “Compact Left Pane” option from the “View > Show” toolbar menu.
Use the “Quick filter” above the left pane page
menu to quickly reach pages of interest. The filter not only supports
searching in the actual menu entries, but also looks in a predefined
set of keywords relevant to each page when trying to match your query.
For example typing "variable" in the filter will
bring up the Environment Variables Page page, where you
can configure environment variables.
Page Display
The center stage for creating your installer is this large area on the right. It is the main work area - all project data is displayed here.
Info Panes
This panel will display one of the selected panes from the “View > Info Panes” menu and it is hidden by default. You can close it again by clicking on its top-right corner button.
Topics
- Ribbon
A description of Advanced Installer's ribbon and of actions attached to each tab. - Main Menu
A description of Advanced Installer's main menu and of actions attached to each item. - Issues Pane
Displays issues and offers to fix some of them. - References Pane
Finding where a file, folder or property is used. - Notes Pane
Displays various notes added that are specific for the selected view