1) When Cruise Sheet 1.2 is opened, you are taken directly to the home page shown below (it runs off your computer’s C-drive, and displays on your web browser). Using the menu to the left, or the options in the body of the page, you specify the type of cruise you will be working with, as well as the particular type of results you desire . In order to provide flexibility, numerous options are available for you to take advantage of. Because of this, you will be prompted to make selections in a couple of additional pages (not shown).

2) Upon making your final selection the appropriate tool will automatically be opened. You should immediately save a user copy of the file, and remove the read only attribute. All of your work should be done on this user copy. There are several different tools available, but they all have the same method of operation. First you enter your data and information in the yellow colored cells. The results are immediately generated and displayed on the last sheet. These results are ready to be printed, used to generate graphs, or be further analyzed using the data processing tools provided in Excel®. Below is a sample file which can be used to process point cruises.

3) Once the first page is filled in, all that is left to do is to enter the tree list. The tree list sheet (see below) is the second sheet, and can be accessed by clicking on the tab at the bottom which says “Tree List”. Tree lists can be entered by hand or imported from text files. Because Cruise Sheet 1.2 allows up to 100 points or 2000 trees for each stand, as well as provides results by species (up to 16) by diameter class, there are a tremendous number of calculations which are processed behind the scenes. In order to avoid having to pause for this processing each time you edit a cell in the tree list, a data entry file (which appears identical to the tree list sheet) is available. After entering your cruise data into this file, you then simply copy and past it into the tree list sheet (and hence only have to pause for calculations once).

4) At this point the process of summarizing your cruise is finished. Results for basal area, trees per acre, sawtimber volume and pulpwood volume are ready and available on the third sheet. Click on the third tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet to view them. A portion of one of the tables is displayed below. That is all there is to it. Simple!