Frequently Asked Questions

In a continuing effort to facilitate communications within the pharmacy industry we have released the NCPDP Website version 3.1. This is part of an ongoing drive to restore and improve the features available to our members. Listed below are some helpful suggestions and remedies for the most common difficulties.

Website Navigation
Website - Known Issues
Secure Online Registration Forms
Working with Portable Document Format (.pdf) files
Working with Compressed Files (.zip) a.k.a WinZip

Navigation

The NCPDP website uses a Javascript based drop-down menu. Clicking on the hyperlinks on the left side of the screen will change the page you are viewing and cause the associated sub-menu to appear presenting another list of hyperlinks. If you would like to stay at the current page but would like to see what is under another heading click on the plus sign next to it and the menu will drop down (note: this will cause any currently open menu to close.)

At the bottom of every page is a list of links to the essential areas website. For those who do not have a Javascript capable browser or choose not to enable scripting languages the 'site map' link will prove invaluable. It also comes in handy if you are not sure where to go. The site map shows all of the pages on the NCPDP website in hierarchical order

Known Issues

The NCPDP website is designed for viewing by version 4.0 or higher browsers in a resolution of 800X600 or higher. Our site actually consists of three separate pages arranged as one in what is known as a frameset to reduce the amount of redundant information transmitted (i.e. HTML, menu JavaScript, images etc...) to and from the website. This may be efficient but can result in other problems.

Printing
In most cases there should be no problem printing pages from the site, but some printers have advanced options that allow the printing of an entire frameset or parts thereof. If you are getting more or less then you want when printing use the hyperlink at the bottom of the page.

Bookmarking (a.k.a Favorites)
To avoid navigation problems the content pages of our site will automatically reload themselves inside the default frame if they detect they have been accessed without the navigational menu. While we recommend viewing our opening page for important changes, you can bypass this by adding the prefix frame_ and .htm to the suffix to the name of the page you wish to bookmark. e.g. I want to bookmark the News HIPAA page(news_hippa.asp) the favorite or bookmark created would have the URL properties of http://www.ncpdp.org/news_hipaa.asp.Which I would change to http://www.ncpdp.org/ frame_news_hipaa.htm

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Secure Online Registration Forms

For your convenience, you can now register for the NCPDP Annual Conference, Work Group meetings or Educational Programs online. When using the online registration forms, you may notice a lock icon at the bottom of some of the pages. This indicates that the online form you are working with is a secure document.


While all of the pages in the online registration process are secured, you may not always see the lock icon. This is due to design of the web site. The web site is built around three separate windows (indicated in the diagram below). While the registration information window is secure, the header and menu window’s are not. Therefore, the lock icon may not be visible on all pages, however, all of the online registration information is in a secure window.

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Portable Document Format (PDF)

Most of the documents on our site are converted to PDF (Portable Document Format). Allowing them to be viewed and printed as if it were a paper document regardless of hardware or software used by the viewer. The only requirement is that you have the free Adobe Reader™ browser plug-in available here

When working with Adobe Reader it is important to remember that to perform any action you'll need to use the Adobe Reader™ toolbar and not your browsers. See figure-1 below.

Figure-1.

For example: If you wanted to print the current document you would press the printer icon (third button in from the left, while looking at it.) See Figure 2 for more details

Figure-2.
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Compressed Archives (WinZip)

Q: What is a zip archive?

A: Zip archives are one or more files that has been packed to save disk space. This is done by reducing the common repedative values to a single reference e.g. Instead of storing all the information on this page a zip file would contain the number of times each letter, number or color was used and where.

On the NCPDP website you will see two types of compressed archives:

  1. Compressed Archives (.zip)
  2. Self Extracting Executables (.exe)

Compressed Archives
To work with this type of file you will need some software (although, most systems today will have this software pre-installed) If you do not have the software you can get it here: http://www.winzip.com/ After downloading the file (.zip) double left click the icon (see figure-3.)

Figure-3.

Next you will see something like this:(see figure-4.)

Figure-4.

From this point you can open (double left-click) any of the files in the archive or move them to another folder (a.k.a. extracting) so you don't have to open the archive every time to see them. The easiest way to accomplish this is to select the file(s) and hold down the left mouse button and drag the icon to where you want it.

Self Extracting Executables
These are most commonly found in the standards download section of our website. The files end with the extension .exe and no other software is needed to use them. Just double left-click the icon and they will extract themselves. You will be prompted as to which folder to put them in. If you don't specify one they will be sent to the ncpdp folder in the root directory. Most likely this would be c:\ncpdp\.

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