Standardizing Prism Preferences
What is included within the preferences file?
Prism offers many choices on its Preference dialog. It allows you to set defaults for color schemes, fonts, symbols sizes, graph units, and more. Beyond that, the Prism Preferences file remembers which files you have recently opened or closed, user-defined equations you have created, color schemes you have created, autocomplete text, and more. All that is saved in a preference file. This means that Prism is customized for you.
Where is the preference file located?
How to prevent saving changes to the preferences file: Windows
When Prism is used in a teaching lab, you want Prism to startup the same way each time. When a student uses Prism, you don't want preferences set by other students to be used, as that would make it seem that Prism acts unpredictably.
The first step is to create and write-protect the preference file.
- Delete the Prism preference file. Details.
- Launch Prism so it creates a default preference file.
- Set any preferences as you want them to appear for each user.
- Quit Prism.
The second step is to add /C to the Prism command line, to tell Prism not to resave the preference file when it exits. Individual users will still be able to make changes to the Preference file, and these will be used during that session. But those changes won't get saved and so won't be seen by the next user. This will only work with Prism 5.03 and later.
How to prevent saving changes to the preferences file: Mac
When Prism is used in a teaching lab, you want Prism to startup the same way each timel. When a student uses Prism, you don't want preferences set by other students to be used, as that would make it seem that Prism acts unpredictably.
The method explained above for Windows doesn't work, because there are no command line switches in OSX. Instead, create and write-protect the preference file.
- Delete the Prism preference file. Details.
- Launch Prism so it creates a default preference file.
- Set any preferences as you want them to appear for each user.
- Quit Prism.
- Write protect the preference file:
Open the folder that contains the preference file
: ~[local user]:Library:Preferences
Beware that Macs have multiple Library folders. Pick the one within the local user that each student will log in as, not the overall Library folder.
Right-click on the file "com.GraphPad.Prism.plist", and choose Get Info. Check "Locked".
Repeat for the file that contains the list of autocomplete text entries: com.GraphPad.Prism.autocomplete.plist
How to have Prism always start with customized preferences when run from a network
If you have a concurrent network license (no longer available with Prism 6 and later), Prism is launched from a "server" (really, any shared hard drive will suffice) and run on each individual computer. Prism puts the preference file on each computer, so different people can have individual preferences. When Prism launches, it looks for a preference file on the local computer and uses that if it exists. Otherwise, it looks in the program folder and uses that preference file.
If you want everyone to share the same preferences, at least to begin with, put a preference file into the Prism folder on the server. That will become the initial set of preferences for every user, but they will be able to change them.
How to switch between multiple options files on one computer (Windows only)
Include /O in the command line of an icon, and you can specify which preference file to use. This means you can have several Prism icons, each using a different preferences file.