Quick Pallet Maker Preferences
The first step that a user should take when running Quick Pallet Maker for the first time is to set up the user preferences. This window is available from the Tools menu (Windows) or from the Quick Pallet Maker menu (macOS). This window contains eight settings tabs.
General Settings
Units: The first of the settings allows the user to select the default units between mm, cm and inches for length and kilograms or pounds for weight.
Auto-save last file: The next item is a checkbox that if selected will save the last input file and open an identical file each time the user calls for a new document. The settings in this file will override the default pallet and default units. This is specially useful when working with customized case widths.
Pallet Divider Thickness: The third item in this tab is a pull-down menu from which the user chooses the default thickness of the pallet supports: top cap, corner posts and layer dividers. This default thickness is expressed in the different types of standard board flutes.
Shift display cases towards pallet borders: A checkbox at the bottom of this tab allows the user to choose whether the boxes will be shifted to the pallet borders in display pallets. In this case, there will be some slack between boxes to make sure that the load dimensions are equal to the shipping pallet dimensions, adding stability to the load.
Default Case View: A pull-down menu is used for selecting which case view (e.g. open case) would the user want to see first when recalculating data.
Don't check for updates: The next control on this first tab is the "check for updates" box. When checked, Quick Pallet Maker will not try to connect to the internet to see if there is a newer version available.
Mute Layer Editor: If you click the last checkbox, when boxes collide in the Layer Editor, there will not be any sound.
Colors
Quick Pallet Maker presents a tab where the user can change the default color of each one of the packaging items in his/her shipping pallet. The color options that can be changed by clicking on any of the colored squares are the followng:
- Primary Package colors: The four options span the rectangular container sides and top besides the cylindrical container top.
- Container (as in box): the external color of the boxes produced by QPM
- Internal box divider: Clicking this square will change the partitions' colors.
- Layer pads, top cap and corner posts
- Pallet color
Custom language in Report Text
Although Quick Pallet Maker is currently available in nine different languages, the detailed packaging report can be saved in any language or special terminology. This feature lets the user translate each phrase in the report, save the translation and then select the custom language option to display the modified text in the report. The top selector allows to choose between the default language (in this case; English) and the custom language (whichever you pick). The table at the bottom provides the user with a list of the phrases that are included in the report. In the first column and in the second column in the custom language.
To edit or add a translation,
- Select the appropriate row and the translation will appear in the text box at the bottom (if there is any).
- Type the text in the box and change to another row to view how the new text has been added.
Primary Package
The purpose of this section is to regulate the types of packages that the user can load. Here we set the following primary package parameters:
- Maximum Primary Package Length
- Maximum Primary Package Width
- Maximum Primary Package Height
- Maximum Primary Package Weight
Box
Here we set the default constraints for the cases.
- Maximum Case Weight: this parameter is important since the software will not calculate pallets if the resulting boxes are heavier than this value.
- Length/Width Ratio of the calculated boxes
- Length/Height Ratio
- Height/Width Ratio
- Maximum slack in case (Length x Width x Height): if box fill calculations deliver more slack than the values here, then the boxes will not be taken into account.
- Maximum internal compression (Length x Width x Height): allows flexible objects to be compressed into boxes
Import Box
Here we set the columns that are imported for case shipments. The parameters that can be checked are the following:
- Units
- Type
- Length
- Width
- Height
- Weight
- Color
- Amount
- Code
- Description
- Class 1
- Class 2
Routes
This section is for setting the columns that are used for importing routes. The possible values are the following:
- warehouse
- driver_id
- driver_name
- truck_name
- comment
- po
- client_id
- client_name
- prod_seq
- trip