The COW Cheat Sheet

If you don't have the time to go through the entire tutorial or if you really don't care to, this page is for you. It's a fairly concise summary of how to do the important things in COW. I suggest making a printout of this and keeping it with you until you become more fluent with COW.



How to get into COW

  1. Open your WWW browser to http://calypso.rs.itd.umich.edu/COW/
  2. Click 'Umich Enter'.
  3. Type your regular U of M uniqname and password, click 'Log in'. These steps take you to your Hotlist, your personal home on COW. If you ever need to get back to your Hotlist, just click on the yellow 'Hotlist' button at the bottom of the page.

How to sign up to a conference

  1. If you are not in your Hotlist, click on the 'Hotlist' button at the bottom of the page. This page shows you what conferences you currently belong to.
  2. Click on the 'Change Hotlist' button.
  3. Use your mouse to check the boxes next to the names of the conferences which you want to subscribe to. You can also uncheck conferences you would like to be removed from.
  4. Click on the 'Write New Hotlist' button.
How to read new messages

  1. If you are not in your Hotlist, click the 'Hotlist' button.
  2. Look at the list of conferences. Click on the first one to have a number greater than zero under the new column. (This column tells you how many new messages you have in each conference).
  3. Scroll down to the end of this conference page. Look at the list of topics.
  4. Click on the first topic to have a number greater than zero under the new column. Similarly, this column tells you, for that particular conference, how many new messages you have in each topic.
  5. Click on a Conversation that has new messages.
  6. Read that page of new posts. When you are done, click on the Next New Post button, or post your own response in the response box.
  7. The title at the top of each page will tell you the name of the conversation, the topic, and the conference. There is another, simpler, way to do this. From your Hotlist, click on the "Read New Responses" button. This method is better used, in my opinion, if you have been using COW for a while and are familiar with the conferences and topics inside because it will skip the conference and topic messages and take you directly to the conversations.

How to read older messages

  1. Click on the 'Hotlist' button.
  2. Click on name of the conference.
  3. At the bottom of that page, click on the name of the topic.
  4. At the bottom of the topic page, click on the name of the conversation you want to look back into.
  5. Use the 'go back One Day, the 'go back One Week, and/or the 'go back One Month' links at the top of the page to go back in time until you see the messages you are looking for.
How to post a message

  1. Click on the 'Hotlist' button.
  2. Click on the conference you want to post the message to.
  3. At the bottom of that page, click on the name of the topic to which you would like the message posted.
  4. At the bottom of the topic page, click on the name of the conversation you want to reply to. If none of those conversations fit what you want to say, click on the 'Start New Conversation' button at the bottom.
  5. If this is a reply message, use the drop down list to pick the type (angry, ok, idea, confused, question, etc.). If this is a new conversation, type a general title for the conversation.
  6. Type the body of the message in the large text box.
  7. When you are done, click on the preview response button to make sure everything looks good. Then, click the BACK button on your navigator.
  8. If you like the way it looks, simply click on the submit response button. If not, make the necessary changes and go back to #7.
Quitting COW

When you are done using COW, click on the Logout button at the bottom of the page.