PC - Usability Tips

To get the best out of Football Manager 2007 you'll need to set up your game to specifically suit your preferences. When starting a new game it's important you know what you want from Football Manager as you'll be faced with lots of options designed to help your enjoy the perfect Football Manager experience.

Firstly, you'll see a 'Start New Game' "wizard", which is a setting ideal for first time or relatively new users. If you're using this approach, you'll need to select the nations you'd like to have active within your game - using the "wizard" you can only have three nations, but through the advanced setup you can have more - then you'll need to choose which leagues you'd like playable within these nations. Then select a start date. And then choose what size database you'd like to play the game with - this is particularly handy for players with older or not so advanced PCs.

Now start your game.

Of course to really tailor the game to your needs, you can click the 'advanced options' button on the wizard and take complete control. This will allow you to view all the playable leagues and pick and choose the exact ones you want active throughout your game. You can also switch on or off certain options such as "attribute masking" and real players.

Once the game's main options have been selected it's a good idea to head into the general settings and make sure everything is set up as you desire. In this section you can alter all sorts of things, from network options to how a player's weight and height are displayed, right the way through to which topics you receive news about in your in-box. It's worth spending a little bit of time looking through and changing things to suit your needs.

Display and sound do exactly what they say on the tin, and allow you to alter the games look, feel and sound. On the left hand screen you'll see a section called extra files; this is where files you've added to the game are displayed, and you'll also notice there are some files already installed such as board takeovers and patches - if you want these files active in the game, simply tick the relevant box.

Finally you have the shortcuts option. Some people don't use this at all, other use it extensively, but it's something that works exactly as you would imagine. You can simply set up shortcut key commands for virtually any command in the game.

Next up you need to create your manager profile, and again you have a walk through wizard option, which allows you to select the basic functions. For a more in-depth set-up, simply click "advanced" and you'll see a huge selection of set-up options.

You need to enter your name, date of birth, nationality, second nationality and, new for Football Manager 2007, you have the option of past experience, which will affect the fans and board's expectations of you.

Also on this page you can pick a favourite team and set up a security password should you wish to. Then you can select your team, which you do by clicking into the squad page, making sure everything is suitably set-up and then clicking take control. Now confirm this selection in the "New User" screen.

Now the game is up and running. One other thing to bear in mind is that you can select the detail with which you view certain competitions. You can access this by going to options and 'Detail Level' and then changing each competitions level to your liking.