The answer here is frightfully simple. So simple, in fact, that it's one of those things you'd probably immediately dismiss as "nah, that's not it" before you ever stop to explore it.
The background is just a button. So putting an image into the background is as easy as putting an image into any other button. The thing is, the background is 100% buried underneath the other buttons on the page. So to manipulate the background directly, you first have to move one of the active buttons out of the way.
1. Choose any of the active buttons, select it, and press CTRL+B.
The button will disappear behind the background, but it's still there.
2. Now, INSIDE the space of the button you just sent to Back, click.
The large button containing the background is now selected.
3. Using the
Edit & Label Buttons pane, you can now import an image to the background button, just like any other button.
4. When you're done, select the background button again and press CTRL+B.
The background returns to the back, showing all your buttons again.
Now... there's also a little trick you can use to make this even easier. The trick carries over from the Alpha template on MX-3000, and it works like a charm here too.
If you look in the tree view, the name of the page in all URC MX-980 templates also happens to be the name of the background image. So for Page3 in the tree, the background image is named page3.jpg (this assumes that you've turned OFF Window's idiotic habit of hiding the extensions of known file types).
Here's how you can use this to your advantage. If you want to change the background image of Page2, just go create a 240x320 jpg named Page2.jpg and place it in a folder somewhere on your computer. Now, in the tree view of MX-980 editor, select the device that contains the Page2 you want to change. Right click, and from the context menu, choose
Tools>Image Replace. This displays a dialog box that lets you browse to the folder where you placed that new file you called "Page2.jpg." When you do, MX-Editor will look in that folder, see that there's a file called "Page2.jpg," and then it will search the entire device you selected to see if any buttons there have images called "Page2.jpg." If it finds any, it replaces the existing image with the one in the folder.
Viola! New background on Page2, with no button manipulation at all!
Eagle eyed MX-980 Editor users will immediately wonder, "hey, could I use this Image Replace command to effectively "skin" an entire MX-980 device? And the answer is yes! A while back I posted a fairly detailed explanation of the process here on Remote Central:
Skinning MX-980 TemplatesBest regards,
Dale
