TFQA: Tools for Quantitative Archaeology
     kintigh@tfqa.com   +1 (505) 395-7979

TFQA Home
TFQA Documentation
TFQA Orders
Kintigh (ASU Directory)

Installation & Getting Started

INSTALLATION

1. You will have an email with a link to the download location. Using your browser, download TFQAPackage.exe to your Desktop. Your browser may automatically download elsewhere (e.g., Downloads)--that is fine too.

2. Using Windows Explorer or My Computer, start the installation by double clicking on TFQAPackage.exe wherever you just downloaded it.

3. When asked where you want to "Extract to"  choose your Desktop or Downloads folder, for now, and click on the "Extract" button.  (In Windows 7, 8, and 10 you may not be able to easily extract it to the Program Files folder because of permissions.)

4. When you are asked for a password, enter the password from your order response email exactly as it was provided. This will put the toolkit programs in the folder "TFQA" on your desktop (or wherever you told it).  If you get a message saying that "This program may not have installed correctly", you can ignore it.  Just close the window.

5. Use Windows Explorer or My Computer to move the TFQA folder to C:\Program Files (x86), c:\Program Files, or wherever you prefer. Windows 7 will want administrator permission to move it to Program Files; if this is a problem, you can also leave it on your desktop or move it anywhere else you have access to.

6. The computer needs to know where the programs can be found. See Running TFQA under Windows for instructions.

GETTING STARTED & DOCUMENTATION

You will need to read at least Overview of Programs the Program Conventions, and Running the TFQA Programs under Windows.You may also want to scan the documentation for the individual programs to get specifics on the algorithms, options, input formats, and output. The latest version of the full toolkit documentation is available online at http://tfqa.com/doc. (The HTML program documentation files at the dtime the dirtibution package was created are also included the the distribution in the TFQA/Doc folder). A pdf of an out-of-date printed version of the manual (147p from 3/11/2006) is contained in TFQA\doc\tfqaDocOutdated.pdf.  A copy of my spatial analysis survey article is also there (Kintigh1991SpatialAnalysis.pdf).

Running the Tools for Quantitative Archaeology under Windows is a bit unusual because the TFQA programs, with a handful of exceptions, are "console mode" true Windows programs that do not have a menu driven interface or sophisticated file navigation capabilities.Running the TFQA Programs under Windows explains how to set things up to run them conveniently. The essential thing is that the programs look in the proper folder for the data files you need and that they output files to the same place.

The few programs that produce graphics are DOS programs (KMPLT, DIVPLT, LDPLT, BAYES, SCAT, and FORD) and demand special attention to run; see Running TFQA Graphics Programs . In particular they do not deal with long file names and are restricted to, at most, 8 character file names (with no spaces or special characters) followed, optionally, by a period and a 3 character extension (e.g., MYDATA.ADF). If you have files you want these programs to read that don't meet these DOS conventions, you must rename them so they do.

To avoid frustration, once you have installed the programs, please read (really!) the Program Conventions, and Running the TFQA Programs under Windows before you try running anything.

CSV Files

Using CSV Files

In the CSV subdirectory, created when you install the program, are versions of several of the main programs that will accept comma separated value (CSV) input rather than the standard program input (with separate files for data and row and column labels) described in the documentation. If you preparing data files to analyze with Excel or another spreadsheet (or want to go back and forth through Excel), these may be easier to use (do File>Save As>CSV in Excel). These versions of the programs use dynamic storage allocation which allows them to do problems of almost unlimited size. These are both steps on the road to a Windows interface, but for now they retain the DOS-like interface though they are true windows programs. See Programs Using CSV Interface for more information and a description of the input format.

In general, you don't need to know this. The main TFQA directory contains the latest versions of all the programs in the package. With the except of the programs that produce graphics directly (e.g., kmplt and ldplt) and a few other minor programs, the TFQA programs have been converted from their original DOS forms to Windows console programs that handle bigger problems and run very much faster. These Windows programs have essentially the same interface as the DOS programs.

Page Last Updated: 1 April 2020