Property-Bee Toolbar Help

Yes, you can safely clear you cache and/or cookies without the toolbar losing your data.

No you don't have to click on every property individually, just viewing each page after doing a search is enough.

The filter menu tells the toolbar which bits of information to show in the history.

When the entry in the menu is ticked, the associated information will be shown in the history of each property.

To try this out for yourself, browse some properties on rightmove and;

• on the Style menu, select "Full History"
• on the Filter menu, select each item which are not ticked in turn; so they are all ticked.

If you look at the history for each property, every detail that the toolbar has collected is shown.

If you are not interested in the Agent, their Address, Location or Telephone number then under the Filter menu, untick "Agent", "Agents Address", "Agents Location", "Agents Telephone".

Now when you look at the history information (you don't need to reload the page), everything apart from the agents details is shown.

To take this to the extreme, try unticking everything the Filter menu except Price.

Now when you browse properties those which haven't changed price will just show one row of history.. the price when you first viewed the property.

For those that have changed price, there will be 2 (or more if your lucky) rows. As before the bottom row shows you the price when you first viewed the property, the rows above show how the price has changed (with the most recent change at the top).

Although this example uses the Full History style (because its easier to see what is happening), the filter menu can also be used with "Changes only" style.

The style menu tells the toolbar how to display the information (as opposed to the filter menu which tells the toolbar which bits of information to show).

Currently there are two styles;

• Fully history - this displays every detail possible
• Changes only - this only displays changes

This style displays everything possible detail that the toolbar knows about, in particular;

• The exact date and time the information was collected
• The data when you first viewed the property and any changes since then
• If a property listing has changed several times in one day, you will see more that one row for that day

We have demonstrated the Full History style when explaining the Filter menu, if you are unsure go back and try it out.

The changes only style attempts to reduce the amount screen space used to display the history, by

• Not showing any data from the first time you viewed the property, only a row with the text "Initial entry found."
• Showing changes in data (if selected in the filter menu)
• It only shows the date (and not the time)
• If the property information changes several times in one day, only one row for that day will be shown.

To try this out for yourself, browse some properties on rightmove (to get the best affect, try and use a property where some of the details have changed) and;

• on the Style menu, select "Full History"
• on the Filter menu, select each item which are not ticked in turn; so they are all ticked.

Now change the style to "Changes only".

You will see the history no longer shows text like "Found Price: £295,950" and "Found Brief Description: xxxxx..."; instead there is a single row at the bottom with "Initial entry found."

If any data has changed, you will see these in the same way as the "Full History" style.

Irrespective of which style / filter setting you use, property bee will always use colours to highlight changes.

The colours purely depend on when the information was found (either originally or a change).

For information found;

• today, the colour is white text on a darkish blue background.
• between 1 and 2 days ago, the colour is black text on a lavender background.
• up to a week ago, the colour is black text on a light lavender background.
• older than a week, the colour is black text on a white background.

Select from the toolbar, "Data Wizards" followed by "Export CSV File".

On the computer with the property-bee data you wish to use, select from the toolbar, "Data Wizards" followed by "Move Data Folder", and select a folder on your USB memory stick and tick the transfer files box.

For any other computer you wish to use the data on, do exactly the same as above except make sure the transfer files box is NOT ticked.

At the moment (as of version 1.0.3.0) none of the information is shared, so they will have to do their own searches.

However in the next version (1.1.0.0) there will be functionality which means information users of the toolba will help each other, and become form a "bee".

I haven’t tested this yet, so it would be wise to keep a backup of the data.

I believe automatic Firefox updates should not cause a problem.

If you manually uninstall Firefox, then I believe that Firefox will leave the directory.

The toolbar uses Firefox’s update mechanism, so you should automatically be informed when a new version of the toolbar is available.

Alternatively you can manually check by Tools > Add-ons. Select Property-Bee Toolbar, right click and select check updates.

See the version history.

All the information is stored on the local disk, in a folder called property-bee which is under your Firefox profile folder.

The actual location depends on which OS you are using; usually the path will be;

where

• xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters.
• yyyyyyyy is the name you use to log onto Windows with.

Note: To navigate to these paths under Windows you must enable "Show hidden files and folders". In Window Explorer select "Tools" the "Folder Options". In the window that pops up select the "View" tab, followed by under the advanced settings "Show hidden files and folders". Press ok

They are a sparse (ie only changes are saved) csv like format where | is used as the separator.

Javascript, there is no executable or dll distributed as part of the toolbar.

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