The best decisions are ones that bring happiness to you, your family, and others, without adverse conseqences. Pathways has a number of new features that help you to consider how your plans affect other people...

Tracking Motivational Fulfilment: Pathways now presents "traffic light" status symobols on all outcomes on the main planning grid, so that you can see at a glance the overall impact of your plan on all participants.

To accompany this, there is a new Motivational Satisfaction report that shows the status indicators in a Gantt chart view. This is a very useful supplement to the existing Motivational Satisfaction report, that shows the status for any selected person in the plan.

Good decisions also involve consideration of alternatives and contingencies. As in past versions of Pathways, you can define alternative paths and define the consequences of each alternative. However, in Pathways V5, the Pathways Consequences functionality has been completely overhauled. Now you can define consequences based on any combination of conditions conceivable, including and/or/not conditions involving multiple outcomes or paths. Moreover, all consequences can be defined as certain outcomes or as probabilities. If you have a difficult choice to make, you can model every choice and the results of each one. This will help you to think clearly and arive at a logical solution.

However, good planning will not necessarily solve all your problems! For a successful life, you also need to handle unpredictable situations that arise. For that purpose, it is helpful to define "personal policies" and to follow time-tested principles. Pathways now comes with a policy book ("book reader") that enables you to keep your policies in an indexed list with optional cross references. Moreover, the Pathways book reader includes an expert system so that you can build in questions and answers, and define the logic that determines which action should be undertaken in each situation.

Pathways 5 also includes improved "idea for the day" functionality. It now lets you specify a "play list" of idea books. This feature was added in order to accommodate new idea book(s) that will be made available later in 2011. Moreover, you can create your own idea/policy book(s) and put them in the play list, as a reminder to yourself, or as a handy way of leaving nice messages for your family members to see when they turn on their computer.

Every topic in the online manual now includes a short "user response" option at the end, so that you can quickly and easily submit feedback to the www.Pathways.com web site. This will help the author to improve the content, put more useful "Q&A" answers on the www.PathwaysPlanner.com web site, and plan for ease-of-use improvements in future releases of Pathways.

More than 200 self-diagnositic checks have been incorporated into the Pathways planner. In the event of a program failure, the user will be presented with an option to transmit the error information to the PathwaysPlanner.com web site. This will facilitate further reliability improvements in subsequent Pathways versions.

A variety of bug fixes have been made in Pathways 5, and further testing is underway as part of the Pathways 5 Beta Test initiative.

The Pathways Alarm clock will display a tool bar of programs to run. Typically you would set up the Alarm clock to run whenever your computer is started, so that you will be alerted to upcoming events. Now the Alarm clock also presents a handy way to launch Pathways and its accessory programs.

One of the major benefits of Pathways is its ability to handle home financial management, including investment planning, budgeting, and managing expenses. Some people use Pathways solely for its money tracking capabilities, and to please those people a number of features have been added.

Pathways Transaction form:

The form has been made easier to use. The the current row is highlighted to make it easier to identify the current location in the table. The user can now alter the transaction date by clicking on it rather than having to choose a function from the menu. To add a row it is no longer necessary to scroll to the bottom of the list; the user can select "add" from the menu or press a function key.

Pathways Activities form:

The form easier to use when entering transactions because the irrelevant columns are hidden (However, the user may view them if desired, in case a transaction is constructed from a scheduled activity.)

Pathways Bond Wizard (new):

A new wizard is added for creating a bond with annual payouts and a redemption. All of the cash transactions for the purchase, payouts, and redeption are created automatically.

Differentiation of Banks and Assets

Any store of wealth can now be designated as a "bank" (cash) or an "asset" (investment). Financial reports that formerly reported bank information now permit the user to include cash banks, assets, or both.

Pathways Bank/Asset Growth by Era Report (new)

A new report is added to help a user plan their investments over several years (helpful to plan reinvestment of bonds that come due).

Improved Pathways Bank/Asset Status Report

An "effective date" parameter was added so that the user can run a report for a particular date (not including transactions after that date).

This enables the user to put in transactions throughout the year in advance of them occuring (to ensure that none are missed on bank statements), but yet still get the current balance.

Also this report now lets you choose whether you wish to report on all banks and assets, only banks (cash assets), or only non-cash assets.

There is now a wider choice of options for recurring appointments, so that most kinds of recurring appointments are accommodated.

When viewing a list of appointments, to-do items, or transaction details on the Activities form, the form border can now be dragged to resize the form both horizontally and vertically. This enables a longer list of activities can be viewed at one time.

The address book now has "user definable" fields that may contain numbers or text. This enables you to keep additional information about your contacts - whatever you want!

Understanding other people is an important skill for improving your own happiness in life. Now you can track various things about people, such as their favorite hobby, their favorite food, their profession, etc. This helps you to develop the habit of learning things about other people. As you learn more about them, it is easier to know what to do that will please them, and in return they are more likely to please you!

Along with the ability to record this information, the program comes with a new report to print complete details about each person.

A "Filer" program was created that works much like the person and address book, except that you can use it to keep track of anything. For each object, you can enter a description, attach a photo, and enter user-defined fields. Each item can be categorized and you can report on items by category.

In addition, you can define calculations, in order to produce calculated values for each record. You can produce reports that show overall statistics for the calculated fields.

Basically this is more sophisticated substitute for the old-fashioned "card file". It's just as easy to use, but more useful.

If you have used the Pathways Address book, you already know how to use the Filer - the user interface is almost identical.

A facility was added to enable you to choose among books. You can define a play list of the books. This will become useful as more book(s) are offerred later in 2011 or beyond, or in the event that you wish to create your own idea books.

The Idea for the Day program uses the same book format as the new Pathways Reader, so that all book reader features are available. If you like an idea, you can click a button to read the complete topic.

The Pathways Reader is designed to read a text file that contains multiple chapters. It is easy to create your own book files using the instructions presented in the online help. You can also use this program to read the "Pathways Favorites" idea book that comes with Pathways.

When viewed using the book reader, there is a list of chapters to select from, and the user can read each chapter in a scrollable window. The window can be resized to full screen if desired.

Also there is an optional cross reference between chapters that the author may define. The author can also embed a link to their own web site, as well as a copyright notice that the user can view by choosing "help about". If desired, the text within the book can contain formatting such as underlining, headings, and point-form presentation. Also there is a feature available for converting plain text into HTML output.

In addition, the book reader contains an expert system. This enables the author to embed questions and answers within any chapter of a book, and to define advice that is based on the answers to the questions. When a person reads a chapter containing predefined questions, they can answer the questions and the program will automatically select and present the appropriate advice.

The Report Viewer has been enhanced to enable the user to choose the type size (10 CPI or 12 CPI). Formerly all report output was set to 12 characters per inch.

That Pathways Calculator was formerly embedded within the Pathways Planner, so that you could automatically invoke it whenever you were entering a numeric field. Now it is also available as a stand-alone program. In addition to providing the usual "four function" calculator operation, it includes a finance calculator for net present value and annuity calculations.