ANY-maze Help > Using ANY-maze > Setting up an experiment > Using an existing protocol in an experiment

Using an existing protocol in an experiment

In most experiments you will probably want to reuse a protocol you've already created. For example, if you perform many plusmaze experiments, you will probably create a standard plusmaze protocol and then simply use it again and again.

Loading an existing protocol into an experiment

To load a protocol you simply need to switch to the Protocol page and then click the Load protocol button - this will open the Load Protocol window, where you can choose the protocol you want to load.

For more information, refer to Saving and loading protocols

Altering an existing protocol

Once you've loaded a protocol into an experiment, you can change it in any way you like without affecting the original protocol file you loaded it from. For example, imagine you have a standard plusmaze protocol that defines the test duration as 5 minutes. Today, however, you want to try running 10 minute tests instead. Rather than creating an entirely new protocol, you can simply load the standard protocol and then change the test duration to 10 minutes. The change will affect just this experiment; any new experiments you create based on the standard protocol will still have 5 minutes tests.

Of course, if you decide that the new 10 minute protocol is much better than the 5 minute one then you could save the 10 minute protocol as your new standard - then any new experiments would have 10 minute tests.

For more information, refer to Saving and loading protocols

Shortcut ways to create an experiment based on an existing protocol

As the process of creating a new experiment and then loading a protocol into it is so common, ANY-maze includes a couple of shortcuts to quickly perform these two steps. The simplest method is to select one of the protocols shown on the right-hand side of the File page when New experiment is selected*.

In fact, if you perform lots of experiments using the same protocol, then an even quicker method is to place a Windows 'shortcut' to the protocol file on your desktop - when you double click the shortcut icon ANY-maze will start up, create a new experiment and pre-load the protocol.

*Here ANY-maze will list the protocols you have most recently used.

For more information, refer to Saving and loading protocols

Transferring a protocol directly from one experiment to another

In some cases, you may want to create a new experiment that uses the same protocol as another experiment without having to save the protocol first. For example, imagine you have a standard plusmaze protocol. Yesterday you created an experiment based on the protocol, but you changed the apparatus map to include some new zones. As this was just an idea, you didn't bother to save the adjusted protocol.

Today you want to perform another experiment using the same protocol as you used in yesterday's experiment. Clearly you could open yesterday's experiment, save the protocol and then open today's experiment and load it. But quicker would be to load the protocol directly from yesterday's experiment into today's. You can do this using the same method as you'd use to load a normal protocol (i.e. by clicking the Load protocol button on the Protocol page) but in this case, you need to change the Type of file shown in the Load Protocol Window to ANY-maze experiment files - you'll then be able to select an experiment and load the protocol directly from it.

For more information, refer to The load protocol window

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ANY-maze help topic T0036