Help using BabeX
BabeX leads the user through the process of initializing a workbook, defining things like the baby's name, sex, birth date and the default units that the plots will be displayed using.
After the user has installed BabeX, the program can be started by clicking on the BabeX entry in the Excel menubar. If the current open workbook is not a BabeX workbook the dialog below will appear asking the user to either create a new baby workbook or supply the name of a previous one.
Having created the new workbook, BabeX needs the baby's sex, the birth date, the number of weeks premature (+ve) or late (-ve) of the birth and the units to display the data in when plotting.
The weights can be entered in either pounds and ounces (Imperial) or kilograms and grams (metric) (and of course the length measurements can be entered in whatever units they were recorded) but the user can specify what units are used for the table of measurements that is generated by BabeX and the plots.
Each time BabeX is run with the baby's workbook, the user is asked to enter the date (for the first point this will be the date of birth) of the measurement, the baby's weight, length, and head circumference. If a particular reading (eg. head circumference) was not measured then just leave it blank.
The units (eg. lbs or kgs) that the data is recorded is specified by selecting from the pulldown tab. The 'Calculate percentile data' option updates the baby's table with the percentile (using US National Center of Health Statistics data) for that measurement. This can be annotated on the plot that is generated after entering data. No plots are produced when the birth data information is entered but always for subsequent updates.
The are four different plots that BabeX can produce (deselect all options and none are generated)
Weight vs. Age
Length vs. Age
Head circumference vs. Age
Weight vs. Length
The time scale used for the Age axis can be specified as relative to the birth date (in weeks) or the absolute date is displayed. The measured data points can be annotated with the calculated percentiles and also trend lines for a range of percentiles can be displayed so the baby's progress can be compared with others.