1. After you’ve installed Business Plan Pro, click here to download the Imagine Cup Blank Starter Plan, and save it onto your hard disk using a name and location you can easily remember.
2. After downloading, find the file icon on your hard disk (wherever you saved it) and double-click it to launch Business Plan Pro.
3. Business Plan Pro should launch showing a welcome screen with an outline view on the right. Notice that you’re not doing anything with the rest of the plan for the qualifying round, just covering the key points in the summary (Important: note that you’re just doing the simple topics showing as the starter plan in the the illustration below, not any of the rest of the business plan; seven points, as little as a paragraph for each one.)
4. Click on the “Executive Summary” topic in the outline to show that specific topic. Exact clicking from there isn’t important, so the sequence doesn’t matter, just use the toolbar or click on the topics in the outline to show the starter plan outline. Click on any topic in the outline to view the instructions and write your text into the topic.
5. The illustration here shows one way that the screen might look:

6. Quickly save your plan file under another name, in a directory of your choosing, where you’ll know where to get it later.
7. The screen might not show exactly as it does in this illustration, and it doesn’t have to. Details depend on your options. Just make sure you find the Outline view and the starter plan topics within it, and then you’re ready to go. For each of the seven topics suggested for the starter plan, you have topic instructions on top, and word processing in the action window below the instructions. Click on any of the topics in the Outline view on the right to go from topic to topic.
8. By the way, just so you know, the Task item in the Toolbar and the “next” and “previous” arrows below the action window take you out of the starter plan and into the main plan, which you won’t do yet. That’s because the starter plan is customized, specific to your Imagine Cup submission, and not part of the generic business plan. So try to navigate using the Outline view only, rather than the task list or next and previous arrows.
9. Now you’re on your way.
10. Click here for details on how to create the output files you need.

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