Hello,

I have Guide to Birds of North America version 3.5.  I generally like the software, especially the quiz functions.  However, I find the process for navigating to a particular species extremely clumsy.  There seems to be only two choices.  One is to scroll through a list of over 900 entries and select the species you want, and the other is to manually type in the name of the species.  The latter is not an option for me because, like many people, I have repetitive stress injuries and need to minimize my manual typing.  Instead, I use speech recognition software, specifically Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred version 9.  

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is designed to work well with all standard Windows interfaces, but it is clear to me that your software does not use such interfaces.  In fact, it seems to work worse with Dragon NaturallySpeaking than just about any other software I use.  (I tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking with AviSys, for example, and it worked extremely well).  To be specific, when I dictate the name of a species in the scroll box, that name appears but the field guide information for that species does not.  The only way I can get a species to be selected as if I actually manually type the name of the species in the box letter by letter.  (I can also do letter by letter "typing" using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but oddly even that does not work).

Another problem I have is in constructing quizzes via custom lists.  You can only add one species at a time to a custom list, which means if you are constructing a quiz for sparrows, for example, you have to scroll down all the way to the bottom of the list to select field sparrow, and then scroll all the way down again to select tree sparrow.  It would be great if you could select multiple species at a time to add to the list.  For example, by pressing the control key, as with other Windows programs.

I have not tried version 3.9 yet.  If some of these problems have been addressed in the new version, I would like to know.

Sincerely,
HD