★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ Interceptor ★ |
| Interceptor (Camel Micros) | Applications Bureautique |
Interceptor provides extra features for Mini Office II, adding greater user friendliness to an already popular system. Even more importantly, it suggests a new area for future CPC programming. Using Interceptor is surprisingly trouble free. Simply run"disc on the program, and when that's finished load up Mini Office II as normal. And that's it: now Interceptor can be invoked at any time simply by pressing the up and down cursor keys at the same time. The screen which was displayed is saved into the extra memory, and a new menu is brought down: - Save Block This saves the current program module and all of its data onto a blank disk. So you could prepare a template for the database or wordpro-cessor, and save it using Interceptor. When you want to use that pro form a document, you simply load the saved module, rather than going through Mini Office II, going to the program and then loading the module. As you can see, using this function saves a lot of repetition. It does, however, consume large amounts of disk space - up to 95K in fact, so you are limited to a certain extent in the number of templates you can have. Disks - as we all know to our cost - are not cheap. Disk Management Using this set of commands is much quicker than using Mini Office II Possible options including copying disks and files. The standard of copying is pretty good, dealing with several games disks. You can also perform standard disk housekeeping - you know, catalogues, renaming files, erasing files and formatting disks, that kind of thing. Most of this is possible from inside Mini Office II anyway, but Interceptor performs faster, and with an edge in performance. There is also the ability to print ASCII files to the screen or printer. File Convert Importing ASCII text into the Mini Office II word processor is not easy, but using Interceptor it takes a matter of seconds. Screen Save/Print If you are including spreadsheet or database results in a document this option is idea. It takes all of the characters on the screen and puts them either into a file on a disk, or to a printer if that you have one attached. So you don't have to scribble down the results while transferring between the different parts of Mini Office II. Calculator A handy utility that can cope with scientific notation. Perhaps Camel could make it easier to use in future versions? Notepad A replacement for the innumerable backs of envelopes and cigarette packets that generally accumulate near computers. There are 26 pages to write on, labelled A-Z. Editing these is confusing to begin with, because the return/enter keys don't do a lot. Instead the cursor keys should be used for everything - so iaying out text neatly is a pain. Otherwise this neat subprogram works very well. Any changes are automatically saved to disk when you've finished with it, ready for future reference.
Everyday use Interceptor is handy to have around. It doesn't go overboard in terms of power, but provides a lot of convenient shortcuts to people who use Mini Office II regular ly. Using this program does make a genuine difference. Interceptor saves on time, and anything which saves time must be good. People who use Mini Office II a lot -sales are currently claimed to exceed 10,000, and they're still climbing - can expect to find Interceptor a great help. The only problem, beside the fact that it needs 128K to run, is the price At £14.99 you're shelling out a very large proportion of the £19.95 cost of Mini Office II on disk. If. like us. you use MO II regularly, though, the prospec: of streamlining and making the most of it may well outweigh other considerations.
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