How to edit and display chart points

Modified on Fri, Jan 5 at 7:25 AM

There are a few ways to edit and display chart points in the Windows desktop software. We encourage you to play around and see what works best for you.

There are two menus in the software we will be using:

Edit>Chart Points
Display>Chart Points

Let's start with the first menu: Edit>Chart Points

Under Edit>Chart Points, you have submenus: General Points, Major Asteroids, Major Centaurs, Eris and TNOs, and Custom Points. All chart points that we currently offer are included in the General Points submenu. Any selection you make in General Points will always be turned on in the chart until you turn it off in the General Points menu. Think of it as your master switchboard.

Items in the Display column are what will show up in the chart. Items in the From column are not turned on. Moving them to the Display column will turn them on. Please note, there is no way to turn off planets, Chiron, lunar nodes, Part of Fortune, Ascendant, and MC. They are always on.

Chart points from the other four submenus (Major Asteroids, Major Centaurs, Eris and TNOs, and Custom Points) by default are always included in the Display column. However, they will only be displayed if you check them on in the second menu we mentioned at the beginning (Display>Chart Points).

Display>Chart Points

Here is an example workflow:

Deselect all items (place all items in the From category) in Edit>Chart Points>General Points
Select all items in Edit>Chart Points>Major Asteroids (You'll notice they don't show up in your chart. Why?)
Go to Display>Chart Points and check Display Major Asteroids
They will now show up in the chart!

It is engineered this way so you can turn on/off multiple items in a category at the same time. You can always use the General Points menu to turn on/off different chart points and it won't require you to also use the Display menu in conjunction to see your selections. However, you can't turn on/off multiple chart points from General Points at the same time. If, let's say, you only want to Display Eris and Sedna out of the four TNOs, then you would go to Edit>Chart Points>Eris and TNOs and move MakeMake and Haumea from the Display column to the From column, effectively excluding them from view in the chart.

Here is a video demonstrating the information above.