Trouble Shooting Your Bidding 

Downloading

I Can't Download The Bids Even Though I Know They Are Available

Criteria Selection     

Keep Coming Up With Zero Lines?
Trips That Get In After Midnight
Can't view the Total View or one of my Banks

Editing

Losing LOFs When Trying To Edit
Editing/Position Bids/Relief Bids Disappear
Is There A Bid Card To Fill Out Manually?

Bid Download Trouble

The first thing to do is to be sure that the bids are indeed available. To do so, click on the Help menu at the top, and then choose Online Resources/Bid Package Status.

Please remember, the paper bids in your domicile have nothing to do with the online bids. They are two separate processes. Additionally, just because the bids are available in AOL doesn't mean that they are correct (which is probably the reason they are not yet available for BidPlus). To review the process that BidPlus uses to prepare your bids, please click here. To see a list of the mistakes that we have found in past bid packages, click here.

BidPlus does not contain any communications of its own. Instead, it uses Internet Explorer (IE) for communications. That is why IE is required in order to use BidPlus. Generally, any communications problems with BidPlus have to do with IE. Usually reinstalling IE addresses the problem. Since there are no communications in BidPlus that effect connecting to the Internet (which includes downloading your bids), then there is nothing to fix or change.

You may also want to try downloading a bid package from another domicile to see if the problem is with your bids or with the software. If nothing will download, then it is the software. If the problem just started recently all of a sudden, then check to see if any recent changes that you may have made to your computer has contributed to the problem. It is rare that a problem like this just happens "all of a sudden". There is usually a change of some sort that preceded it (regardless of how small you think that change was).

1) Please look down at the Tools button at the bottom. Do you see the words "Restricted Search" in red? If so, that means that something has been restricted, and you will not be shown all of the lines in a search. Please click on the Tools button and look at the Configuration box. The program will only search for those items that are checked. If nothing is checked, then nothing will be produced in your search, and the result will be zero. You should have everything on the right checked, and you should also have the 'No Qualification' checked on the top left. Now when you click OK, the message "Restricted Search" will be gone. To ensure that everything is set properly, click the Reset button at the bottom right.

2) It's usually best to enter only one criterion at a time, and then initiate a search. This will help you see which criterion is causing the program to find zero Lines. If you attempt to enter all of your criteria at one time, you may be creating a combination that does not exist in any of the LOF's in your bid package. Remember, BidPlus searches for the exact combination that you have entered. If you have entered a combination of criteria that does not exist, you will continue to produce zero Lines in your search. It is best to go back and review the Bidding Tutorial provided with this program to better understand the most efficient method for Line selection.

3) The best criteria selection technique to use is to first select your initial Bank using the most restrictive combination of criteria you can put together. In other words, your dream bid. Your next Bank should contain your dream combination, except this time not quite so restrictive. You only need to change very little in the criteria in order to produce more Lines. A simple change like reducing the desired duty time by .30 minutes, or changing max legs per day from 2 to 3, can produce more Lines. Making these little changes from Bank to Bank will help you to be more specific while producing more and more Lines in each successive Bank.

4) If you have created several Banks, be sure to go back and check all of the previous Banks to ensure that your desired lines have not already been selected in one of those Banks. Remember, an LOF can only exist in one place at a time.

Trips That Get In After Midnight (Top)

But be aware! The opposite is also true! If you say that you want mostly 2 day trips, then any trips that arrive after midnight will still be considered 3 day trips to the computer, and therefore won’t be included in your search. So you will need to add an additional criterion or do a subsequent search in another Bank for any 3 day trips as well. Only this time you can use a variation  of the criteria example above. When you look for these 2 day trips (which the computer considers to be 3 day trips because they get in after midnight), be sure to enter something like 0400 to be your latest arrival. This way it will only include those 2 day trips that get in after midnight, but not the traditional 3 day, 3 duty period trips that you really aren’t interested in. With a little experimentation, we believe that the concept will begin to be more useful to you.

One last thing to consider. Look at this graphic again.

If, on the Criteria Selection screen, you would have clicked on the 4th to make it a day off, you would not have seen this line because ID 1233 overlaps onto the 4th. The computer considers it a day on for selection purposes. You should not select it as either a day on or off. You should instead click on it once with the right mouse button and use the Day Expansion feature, which allows you to apply certain criteria to one specific day. You could then make the Day Expansion criteria say "Latest Return - 0200" for the 4th. That way, any trips that get in after midnight, and overlap onto the 4th, would still be selected while preserving your day off on the 4th.

Also notice that the number of days off displayed for this line is 17. In this case, the 4th is considered a day off in terms of counting days off, but not in terms of selecting criteria because of the overlap. Remember, computers are absolute in their ability to make a determination.

Can't View The Total Of One Of My Banks (Top)

The problem probably happened during the construction or editing of your last bank. Try double clicking on each one of your Banks (or clicking the view button to open each Bank) separately to look at the LOFs. You can probably open every one of them but the last one. And it will likely give you another error when you try and open it. That means that's the Bank that has the problem. If that is the case, after you get back into the program, you should delete that Bank and reconstruct it.

Occasionally, something gets corrupted in one of the Banks and it needs to be reconstructed. If you know what the criteria is for the last Bank, you can put it in again and do a search, but be aware that that will cause you to lose any position bidding in the rest of the Banks. You can always reapply the position bidding. The order of the LOFs in your other Banks will stay the same. If you happen to know the LOFs that are in that Bank, you can go into the Unselected lines and cut them out manually. But since you can't open up that Bank, and you can't open up the "binoculars" either because of the Bank with the glitch, you have no way of knowing what LOFs it contains. It's probably easier and a lot faster to just delete that Bank and rebuild it. The bid package is fine, so you don't need to re-download it and start over. Just one of those things. That's why we insist that you save your work often while you are building and editing your Banks. That way there's less work to have to go back and re-do. Rebuilding the one bad Bank should do the trick.

Losing LOFs When Trying To Edit  (Top)

Whenever you use the Delete key to delete an LOF, or a group of LOF's, it cannot be pasted into a new location. Instead, they are returned to the Unselected Lines. You must use the Enter key or the Scissors in the button bar to do your cutting. Remember, once a Line is cut, it disappears for a moment and will not be seen again until you paste it.

Editing/Position Bids/Relief Bids Disappear  (Top)

Position bidding, manually selecting Reserve lines, and Relief bidding should be done last (and in that order), after you have completed all of your searches and editing. Any searches performed on a Bank after this work is completed will cause your Editing/Position bidding/Relief bidding to be lost. If you attempt to perform a search after editing has taken place in a Bank, BidPlus will provide a warning and ask you to confirm this action before continuing.

Is There A Bid Card To Fill Out Manually?  (Top)

The only way to submit your bids is from inside the Banks that you create. There is a "bid card" in the program (click on the binoculars), but it is for viewing the completed bids (all the LOFs that are in the Banks) in a more traditional since prior to their submission. The bids are not submitted from that card. The program was designed for the user to do the entire bidding process from inside the program. It was not designed for the bids to be accessed and figured separately, and then used only for the submission of the bids. Even if the user wants to do their entire bids manually as opposed to having the program make the selections, that can still be done from inside the program.

**Remember, this is a reference guide only. Details about the bidding process can be found in the Bidding Tutorial at any time.

Click on the Help menu, and then select Bidding Tutorial. You can alternate between automatic LOF selection and manual line selection. Click on the View menu, and then choose Unselected lines. These are all of the lines in the bid package that have not been selected and placed into a Bank yet. You can move through your view of these lines by using the direction arrows on your keyboard. To select a line, just hit the Enter key or use the Scissors in the button bar and cut it out for pasting into a Bank later. Or you can drag the mouse across several lines to highlight them, and then use the cut button to cut them out. You can cut out as many lines as you like, in any order you like, and paste them all at once into what ever Bank you like. The cut and paste buttons are in the button bar. Since the lines have already been cut out, all you need to do is paste them into the Bank that you like. Just highlight the Bank of your choice, or add a new empty one, and then click on the paste button.

If the process that you just completed on paper would have been initiated within the program, there would be no need for you to try and enter them into the program now. (Top)