Smart Groups are one of the most powerful features of LogTen. They will help you quickly view your totals based on any attribute of your flying.
What is A Smart Group?
When you launch LogTen for the first time, you start off with a few standard smart groups including Currency information for Day/Night and Instrument operations. Also included are a few flight time Limits for the different time periods: the last week, month, year, 28 days, and 12 months.
Currency, Limit, and regular Smart Groups work in very similar ways, but they will display their information differently. Currencies will count down the number of days you are still current. Limit groups will show the amount of time remaining until you reach the specified hour limit. Smart Groups are the basic option, allowing you to keep count of any value.
These standard Smart Groups are the tip of the iceberg! Dig a little deeper and you will find an incredibly flexible and versatile tool which enables you to:
Track totals for ANY criteria you choose, and you can customize criteria specific to your situation ... want to see flights logged with night time greater than 2 hrs in a B757? No problem.
Set maximums for currency groups, enabling you to handle currencies that require a certain amount of one thing but no more than X of another. E.g. 3 hours total instrument, but no more than 1 hour simulated.
Choose from several options for what data to display next to the group, instead of just Total Time you can choose from PIC Time, Landings, or a count of matching flights
How Can I Set Up Smart Groups?
Here’s an example of how to do it:
STEP 1: Click the “+” button at the bottom left of the main screen and select "New Smart Group". Alternatively, click “File” >> “New Smart Group”.
STEP 2: Name your smart group. For this example, we’re going to sort for tailwheel time, so we’ll name the group Tailwheel Time.
STEP 3: Set the date range. You can look back as well as forward to keep an eye not only on where you’ve been but make sure you’re not hitting limits any time in the near future. So we add the last 12 months as a time limit.
STEP 4: Choose your criteria. Please feel free to play around with this, you’ll see that, with the ability to customize criteria, you can pretty much sort based on anything your heart desires. For this example, we'll choose Aircraft and Tailwheel.
STEP 5: If you wish, you can manually key-in color thresholds to let you know when we’re getting close to your specified limit or goal. You can also have the total on the left side be shown as Total Time, a Count of Flights, Total PIC time, etc.
How different time frames work for "Dynamic Date Range"
The beginning and ending of where a group's entries are populated from are between the "Flight is in the last" and "Flight is in the next:" times. Here are the differences between Consecutive, Calendar, and regular time frames. Days will be used in the following examples but Hours, Weeks, Months, and Years work identically.
Days (regular) will look back in multiples of 24 hours from the current time. For example, if it's currently 1647 PST, 1 Day will look back to 1647 PST yesterday.
Calendar Days looks back to the beginning of the previous day, so 1 Calendar Day looks back to 0000 yesterday or "one calendar day ago", regardless of the current time. 0 Calendar days would be just the current day.
Consecutive Days allows a group to specify a certain amount of time that will automatically reset the group to zero.
Note: Consecutive Days should only be used for the reset functionality
Display Options:
Show Results As - In this dropdown, you can select the data you want the groups to display.
Threshold Color Limits: For Smart Groups, you can set these thresholds to be ascending (from low to high) or descending (from high to low).
Let's take a look at the first example, ascending. Here we have set the thresholds to be 10, 20, 40, All.
If the group's resulting time value is less than 10 it will be grey. Red if the value is between 10-19, orange/yellow if the value is between 20-39, and green if the value is 40 or higher.
Lastly, let's take a look at the Smart Group where the thresholds are set descending. Here we have set the thresholds to be 40, 20, 10, All. If the group's resulting time value is 40 or greater, it will show Red. Orange/yellow if the value is between 39-20, green if the value is between 19-10 and grey if the value is lower than 10.
Click OK and voilà, your new smart group is tracking your totals.
