Efofex News

We have just uploaded a new version of FX Manifest that includes significant new features – many of which have come directly from the comments and requests of teachers.

Alternative Solutions Detection

Some of your questions will have multiple possible solutions. The latest version of FX Manifest lets you include those alternative solutions directly into your manifest. The best thing is that you do not need to remember to do anything “special”.

If you solution contains marks which are a multiple of the number of marks in the question, FX Manifest will automatically flag the solution as containing alternatives.

Better Template Management

Our old template management system restricted you to nine different templates. This proved to be too restrictive for many schools. Our new system allows you to nominate a folder on your computer (or a network share) which holds your templates. You can now have as many templates as you wish – just put them into the folder and give them a name which makes sense to your staff.

Better Curriculum Management (And More Options)

We now have some extra curriculum files available on our website and we will add more as teachers request them. At the time of writing this post, there are specific files for Western Australia and New South Wales.

Download and install the curriculum files to add them to your copy of FX Manifest. As you do this, you will find that you have far more control over which curriculum files are included and you can add or delete curricula on one screen.

Option For Four Difficulty Levels

You can now (optionally) set FX Manifest to track four difficulty levels for questions, as well as change the tags given to each level. You can now exactly match your local systems.

Another Marks Option – mk

We have added another code to add checkmarks – mk. The advantage of this code is that you can use it within the normal text of your solution. You no longer have to add an equation just to use a checkmark.

Create Settings Files and Get Everyone Doing the Same Thing

This one is for all of the heads of department out there!

One of FX Manifest’s greatest benefits is its ability to enforce consistency across your whole department. Everyone uses the same templates and the same output settings and you can get everything “just right”. All you have to do is to get everyone’s copy of FX Manifest set up consistently…

Settings files allow you to do exactly that. Export a settings file from your copy of FX Manifest and send it to your colleagues. All THEY have to do is to double-click on the file and THEIR copy of FX Manifest will be set up in exactly the same way as yours. Settings files make gaining consistency easier for everyone.

Keep ‘Em Coming!

A lot of these changes are in direct response to requests from people just like you. There are thousands of different “systems” around the world. We can only address YOUR needs if we know about them!

This is an important post if you use our products on a Mac machine.

Users recently started complaining that the Efofex Word toolbar was no longer available on their Mac machines and our troubleshooting options were not being successful.

The problem turned out to be an issue with the Adobe Acrobat add-in and, once it had occurred, could not be easily reversed.

We now completely understand what has been happening and have just released new versions of our products that will reliably add the Efofex toolbar to Word, regardless of whether you are using Adobe Acrobat.

If you are using our products in Word on a Mac, we strongly recommend that you download and install a new version from our downloads page (http://www.efofex.com/Downloads.php).

FX Manifest is currently in what we call the “It would be really nice if…” stage of development. We are showing people the software and, after we get past the initial excitement, we start getting the “It would be really nice if” comments.

What makes Efofex different to most software companies is we listen and we act. Sometimes within days. Obviously not every suggestion is fantastic, but many are. FX Manifest just keeps getting better because of them.

Yesterday we released the latest version of FX Manifest that contains quite a few of these changes.

User Created Template Codes

One of the schools that is getting really excited by FX Manifest wanted a way of adding a template code which would be replaced by the teachers currently teaching the course. This led us to allow you to create your own, user template codes. This means that you can create whatever template codes YOU need to satisfy your local situation.

You can manage your user codes via a new button on the Advanced tab, or when you publish to Word.

You can use your User Codes in your templates or even directly within your questions or solutions. It is completely up to you as to how and where you use them.

Which brings us to the next new “IWBRNI”…

Using Codes in Questions and Solutions

We have now enabled questions and solutions to use many of the template codes. This means that a question can dynamically refer to things outside of the question. You could, for example, use this year’s teachers’ names inside your question.

This has prompted the creation of some new codes designed to be used ONLY within the questions and solutions. In particular:

• _FXREF_ which will be replaced by the curriculum reference you have allocated to the question.
• _FXREFEX_ which will be replaced by the explanation of the curriculum reference.
• _FXNOTE_ which will soon be replaceable by a note that you have added to the question (not yet implemented).

Attaching More Than One Curriculum Reference To A Question

We have upgraded the curriculum reference system so you can now attach more than one curriculum reference to each question/question part. This particular “IWBRNI” came from a comment from an International Baccalaureate school that needed to track communication marks for every question, separately to marks for content.

If you attach more than one reference to a question, you need to tell FX Manifest how to divide up the marks. You do this within the question by entering your marks as [2,3] (or [2;3] if you normally use a comma as a decimal place). FX Manifest will automatically allocate the marks to the two (or more) attached references.

But Wait, There’s More!

This is just a few of the many changes we are making to FX Manifest at the moment – all due to the infamous “IWBRNI” process! We want FX Manifest to be a complete, comprehensive and incredibly flexible solution to the problems teachers have managing assessments. “IWBRNI” is an important part of that process, so make sure that you get yours in!

On Friday we uploaded FX Manifest V26.02.20 which activates our new course features.

On the startup page you will find the ability to create a new course, a course primer and an example course to play with.

Just remember that creating and using courses is completely optional. We are not trying to change how you do things, we are just providing tools which can make those jobs significantly easier to do.

We hope that you had a great break and have now successfully settled into your new year’s classes!

We were planning a nice, relaxed Christmas break adding to our examples and updating documentation, but that’s not quite how things went down. Instead, a random interaction at a conference meant that we had a whole new feature set to add to FX Manifest. That work is largely done and you will be given access to it soon.

Managing Courses

FX Manifest brought a whole new level of management productivity to the creation of assessments and other resources, particularly with its ability to map all of your marks onto a curriculum. The new feature provides you with the same bump in productivity, but on a whole course level. It also lets you manage all of the documentation for a course in ONE FILE. Every assessment. Every course outline. All in one place. All with the ability to deep-dive into marks allocations and curriculum references on a whole course level. You can, at the push of a button, create a table which shows exactly where every mark is allocated for every curriculum reference. Compliance documentation becomes trivial and largely automatic.

We are in the final stages of checking the new feature for “wrinkles” as well as developing some documentation to make sure that you can get the most out of the new functionality.

And It’s All Optional!

Our toolkit is never prescriptive. You are never forced into doing things OUR way. If you want to keep using our Classic Edition in the same way you have for thirty years – you are more than welcome to. If you want to use the regeneratable question skills you developed with MultiDocs and Word, fantastic – that is all still available (see rebranding below!) If you want to use FX Manifest’s incredibly powerful new features that make manageing assessments and other resources easy, even better – but you don’t have to. Now we are adding another OPTIONAL layer that you can add to your management of courses. We think that it has the ability to save you and your department hundreds of hours of work per year, and our initial feedback from teachers backs this up, but in the end, IT’S ALL UP TO YOU.

Some Rebranding

The release of FX Manifest (and the new course features) means that we have had to do some rebranding to make things as simple as possible to explain.

First up, we are no longer going to talk about MultiDocs. We are NOT removing any of the features. The old MultiDocs branding was all about creating regeneratable questions within Word. This is still possible, but FX Manifest is a much better option. From now on, you will hear us talking about the “regeneratable question technology in FX Manifest”.

Secondly, we will no longer use the .fxmanifest file extension. A manifest is just a list and, in the first versions of FX Manifest we were concentrating on lists of questions in assessments. The release of the course features in FX Manifest means that we are now, also talking about lists of resources and assessments in courses.

The current release now uses .fxresource as a file extension for manifests for assessments and other resources (like worksheets or notes). We also have a new .fxcourse file extension for manifests for courses. All of this is automatic. You will not have to change anything.

Any .fxmanifest files you have created will just load in as normal. Any NEW files will be created with the new file extensions.

Onwards and Upwards

Now that we have largely completed work on courses, we are putting our documentation hat back on. You will see lots of new materials coming out over the next few months as well as further improvements to FX Manifest’s functionality.

FX Manifest is still young, fresh and incredibly exciting. Whenever we show anyone what it can do, we get to hear that excitement build in their comments. Thanks for being part of its development!

As we rapidly move towards full release of FX Manifest, we have done a bit of housekeeping. FX Manifest represents a dramatic increase in the capabilities of what we are offering and means that it is time to reduce the importance of some of our older systems.

Classic Edition Has Been Deprecated

Deprecated is a powerful word. In the world of software it means…

be usable but regarded as obsolete and best avoided, typically because it has been superseded.

and that describes our Classic Edition perfectly. The underlying technology is Windows only and over thirty years old. We will continue to make it available and support it, but its time has past.

Our new systems, particularly FX Manifest, are our future. They are the only way to use our regeneratable question technology.

FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem and FX ChemStruct Becoming Less Important

ALL of the features of FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem and FX ChemStruct have long been incorporated into FX Draw and FX Equation and we recommend that you restrict your focus to these two, flagship products. Despite this, we have included them in our downloads and given teachers easy access to them, even though they could not be used to create regeneratable materials.

Now that FX Manifest has made creating regeneratable questions easier, these four products have become even less important, so we are making them SLIGHTLY harder to access (in our Manifest edition downloads). We have done this in two ways.

Firstly, you can no longer insert a new FX Graph, FX Stat, FX Chem or FX ChemStruct object from our new toolbar. That is four buttons that we could remove from the toolbar and makes everything much simpler to explain and use.

Secondly, the products are no longer installed by default in our Manifest edition. If you really want them, you have to manually select them.

Documentation & Website Revamp

We are powering our way through rewriting a lot of our documentation and website – removing lots of references to MultiDocs. The nice thing is that FX Manifest is SO much simpler to use when creating regeneratable questions that most of the changes involve REMOVING complicated instructions.

New Prices for a New Year

Unfortunately, we are not immune to the ravages of inflation and 2026 will bring in slightly higher pricing for some locations. We are trying to keep the rise to a minimum and we will honour any quotes we have made.

We have just uploaded a version of FX MathTools that includes the beta version of FX Manifest. To begin with, the beta is ONLY included in the Windows version of FX MathTools. It will appear in FX ScienceTools in the next few days and in the Mac version once we have completed testing.

FX Manifest is new – which means that there are new ideas to come to grips with. BY FAR the best way of getting started is to read the First Time User primer available on the startup screen.

The beta version is feature complete and the file format is fixed. This means that you can use it without worrying about losing any work.

We hope that you will be as excited by this as we are!

It’s been over a year since our last post (well, we DID promise that we would not inundate your inbox!) but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy. In fact, we have been working particularly hard to create a brand new product – FX Manifest.

Take A Look

We have put together an announcement video to give you a quick overview of what FX Manifest can do. You can find it at https://youtu.be/p5gzTPwWll8

All of our products are laser focused on saving you time and FX Manifest is no different. This time, we have focused on providing you with a MUCH better way of using our technologies to produce and manage assessments. For the first time, we have looked at the problems that occur at a departmental level.

FX Manifest takes the entire process of creating and managing assessments and provides tools to ease the administrative burdens this can place on heads of department and experienced teachers. If you use FX Manifest to help you create your assessments you can be far more certain that:

• Marks will add up
• Curriculum coverage is documented
• Solutions will be kept up to date
• Inexperienced teachers will still be able to produce high quality output
• Your Word documents will be well formatted and placed into the department’s “templates”.
• The whole experience will be faster and less error-prone.

MultiDocs Evolved

FX Manifest takes our MultiDocs technologies (which allow you to create questions that can regenerate themselves with new numbers) and makes the whole process simpler. If you have previously looked at our MultiDocs offerings, you will find that the rough edges have been knocked off.

And best of all, FX Manifest will be included into the FX MathTools and FX Science Tools subscriptions at no extra charge. There are no downsides to giving this a go.

FX Manifest has been designed to slot into your existing workflows with minimal impact. All of your old, Word-based materials can be moved into FX Manifest by simply copying and pasting – nothing is left behind. Once you have finished working on your assessment, the final output is a standard Word document, full of editable graphics and equations. The only thing you will notice is that the output is better formatted and you got to the end-line quicker and with less stress.

Coming Soon!

We are incredibly excited about this new product and are planning to get a beta version into our downloads this month – so stay tuned!

The latest version includes two new star tools which allow you to create any star based on a regular polygon.

Once you have drawn a star, select it. You will see an extra control point which allows you to control the ratio between the star’s inside and outside size. This is the same sized star with two different ratios.

When you right click on a star, you can control the number of points.

By controlling the number of sides and the ratio, you can produce a wide variety of different stars.