Spend some time browsing throught the help manual (help tab) and it will answer many of your questions, but here are answers to most of your questions (the program will do most of what you want except automate your non-payments, but you can still do non-payments).
For buying in people who are not going to be paying, . . . when you buy them in, just change the buy-in amount to zero for that person's buy in. It won't do it automatically, but that would be an unusual feature request that I don't think many people would use when it can be done easily at the time of buy-in.
In the chips tab can you put a button so you can estimate the amount of chips that are going to be at the last part of the tourney based on amount of buy-ins, re-buys, and add-ons just like the one on the prize tab?
I don't see how the program can estimate the number of re-buys and add-ons to figure out total number of chips in play. This is variable for every tournament.
You can easily put the total number of chips currently in play (and/or average chip stack) on your layout using the the "chip count" token. This is what players want to know anyway.
Also in the summary tab it would be nice to know the rake of buy-ins, re-buys, and add-ons pressing a button that calculate every thing there. Just like the one i mention above.
The summary tab does give you the total rake and total of buy-ins, re-buys, and add-ons. It can't estimate this because obviously it doesn't know if you are going to have 10 players or 1000 players.
If you buy-in the players you know are going to be playing before the tourney starts (or presume are going to be playing, you can always un-buy them in later) you can get an estimate of your pot and prizes and rake, etc.
In the rounds tab instead of.. or additional to.. the length of the tournament in hours, can you put a place to write the time that the tournament is going to start, so it can give you the time of finish? based on the levels lets say you have ten 30 min levels and and start at 8:00pm the time of finish according to the levels is 1:00am
I know of no way to predict with certainty when a tournament is going to finish. There are also sorts of prediction algorithms, but they only give you an estimate. You never know when those last 2 or 3 players are going to go at it for an hour beyond what you might normally expect. So I am not sure how the program can give you the finish time.
I also will like to see the first and last name of the player when you press add player button in the players tab. Some times you have many players name or called the same
The name that is displayed in the player screen is what you have set up in the preferences tab under the "name format" button on the left hand side of the preferences tab. You can have it set to whatever you want (first name, last name, nickname, dog's name, wife's maiden name, etc
).
When ever i buy-in one, or more players i get a print window?? why is that for? it is really annoying.
Again, go to the preferences tab and go to the receipts button and turn off receipts.
Spend some time looking over the preferences screen and the help tab. It will solve a lot of your start up questions and it will teach you a lot about the capabilities of the program . . . which are quite extensive.
hope that helps.