There is a lot you can do without installing any software on your own machine. Using a browser, you can logon to the Expo online system ("the website", also known as "troggle") as user 'expo' at the Troggle User Login page. (Ask another expoer for the 'cavey:beery' password.) You can:
Documentation on how to actually do these things are in the data maintenance manual.
And using email to send the results to an expo nerd, you can:
and of course using your phone or laptop you can update entries on expo antics on public forums such as ukcaving.
If you also have Survex and Therion installed on the laptop, you can do nearly everything for initial cave survey data entry. See the Survex, Tunnel and Therion installation instructions and the expo data maintenance installation instructions. (These will be moved to a different page in the handbook soon).
We are actively working on increasing the number of expo activities that can be done with just a browser and no, or minimal, installed software.
If you have not actively used troggle since 2018, you are probably not aware of all the things you can now do with just a browser. Many of these capabilities are not new, but they weren't documented and had been forgotten over the past 10+ years. Now these capabilities are documented, though writing better documentation is an unending job, and we have a data maintenance manual.
See the expertise sequence which lists what you can do at each stage.
If you are new to expo and can't do what you want with just a browser and email, then please use the expo laptop in the potato hut first. You don't need to use your own laptop - which can take several hours to configure completely.
To set up your own basic laptop for all cave data maintenance you need to do this:
The expo laptop is a basic laptop configuration. It has everything for editing and testing survey files (survex, aven, cavern), drawings (tunnel, therion), scanned images of sketches and centre-lines, and photographs. The expo laptop in the potato hut is also physically connected to a flatbed scanner but you can use your phone camera instead and email the images to yourself on your laptop.
The expo laptop may also have some software for managing vector images (such as rigging guides), PocketTopo files, GIS digital maps and GPS tracks. See the full data maintenance laptop configuration for details.
Managing large sets of photographs and scanned images, and managing several folders of these on your laptop and on expofiles on the server is finicky and time-consuming. Many programmers use rsync to help them with this, but if you have never used rsync, now is not the time to learn. Use filezilla and FTP. It is at this point that if you are using a Windows machine, you really need to read about how expo uses hard and soft links and filenames on Windows. If things get screwed up badly, it will need someone on a Linux machine to sort it out.
Once you have got all this working, and if it doesn't do what you want or you don't understand how to use it, look at the full data maintenance laptop configuration for everything else. And please write some documentation for the next person in your situation.
If you are just typing up logbook entries then you don't need any other software. If you are working with survey data download this software (short list):
Follow this link to register a key with the expo server to get upload (i.e. read/write) access. Do this first, Without it none of git, scp, ftp or rsync will work.
On a Windows machine you will need to configure pageant (the putty authentication agent) to run at startup to load your key. Note that you are loading your private key, the .ppk file, into pageant and that this key never leaves your laptop.
When using Windows please, please be excessively careful when naming files and survex names and be exceptionally careful when using rsync.
It is necessary to use scp or sftp to manage large collections of files in 'expofiles' See Experts: Uploading files, Uploading files and Uploading GPS tracks. Only machines which have done the key-pair setup process can do scp, sftp or rsync.