Nouvelles

The main purpose of Tsetse Plan is to provide a computerised simulation of the interactive help that would be available if farmers, an NGO or general veterinarian were able to chat with a tsetse control specialist on-site, to assess the situation in their area, draw up the strategy for bait control, identify technical specifications prepare a budget and provide general notes on implementing the plan.

Tsetse Plan is a suite of Excel-based programmes designed to help in the planning and implementation of tsetse control operations.

The core of Tsetse Plan is a utility to help in:

• assessing the feasibility of controlling tsetse in your area
• estimating the current distribution and abundance of tsetse
• designing an appropriate tsetse control strategy
• developing specific tactics to achieve the strategy
• estimating the overall cost

In addition to the above, Tsetse Plan includes simple utilities to help you design and analyse experiments and manage your project accounts.

You can download a Powerpoint slideshow of the programme in action here.

Installing Tsetse Plan
If this is the first time that you have used Tsetse Plan then you need to install the programme on your computer. To do this save the installation file tsetse_plan.exe to your hard disk and then run it.

The current (December 2004) version of Tsetse Plan incorporates several improvements over the (beta) version released in October 2003. These improvements include:-

• Extra consideration of restricted application of insecticide to cattle.
• Production of an Outputs folder to hold the output books.
• The ability to place Tsetse Plan anywhere on your computer.

The programme has been written to operate on Microsoft Excel (version 2000, or later). The present version of Tsetse Plan has been tested with Excel 2000, and Windows 1998, 2000, XP Home and XP Professional and seems to work satisfactorily with these applications.

Some aspects of Tsetse Plan will not operate successfully with early versions of Office XP. This problem can be avoided by running the Office XP Service Pack (SP3 or later). This is freely available from the Microsoft Corporation. SP3 (file version 5.0.2919.6304) is available here.

Starting Tsetse Plan
If you have already installed Tsetse Plan on your computer and you want to start using it, then you need to exit Internet Explorer and open Tsetse Plan using the Tsetse Plan Shortcut on your Desktop or Start Menu, or by opening the file begin.xls.

To run Tsetse Plan, the macro security level of Excel must not be set to 'high'. So, before opening begin.xls, please set the 'Macro security' in the 'Tools' menu to 'medium'.

To help you on certain aspects of using Tsetse Plan, see the following sections

• Vegetation types
• Tsetse maps