★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ MAGIC FILER ★ |
| Magic Filer (Amstrad Action) | Applications Bureautique |
This package sets out to solve your information handling problems - but it isn't a database. It is in fact a filing system intended to organise your data into a tree structure. This would be suitable for handling a product list, for example, or the contents of a library. THE CATALOGUE Your data is filed away in a catalogue. To construct this you have to divide your data into general categories. If you're filing information on a book publisher's list, forexample, these might be Fiction' and 'Non-Fiction'. Type these two categories in and you'll have a menu which looks like this:
You can now break any of these entries down into narrower "sub-categories", creating more and more specialised menus. Each sub-category can be further divided in this way, and the process continued as far as you want to go. Once you've completed this process, you can then enter a page of data rather than a further menu. TREE STRUCTURE This menu/data page system gives the catalogue a tree structure. To find a particular item in the catalogue, you branch through successive menus until you reach the data page you are looking for. However movement within the system is not confined to this branching process. Each menu or data page has an individual æID* number, and typing this in will take you to the page you require from anywhere in the catalogue. Alternatively, you can use the FIND command to search for all those data pages which have a particular keyword. This is not a search facility in the normal database sense - keywords are tags that you enter in the margins of a data page, solely for the purposes of FINDing that page later. They are not normally EDITING AND REFERENCE As well as bypassing the tree structure, you can prune it and move the branches around using the disconnect/reconnect command To do this, of course, you need a fair grasp of the current shape of the tree - and that's none too easy. There is no indication of how deep you are in the tree, and no way I could find of getting any sort of overview. DOCUMENTATION Though the manual is clearly written and avoids unnecessary technicalities, it lacks a proper reference section. If you want to know exactly what a command does or the kind of inputs it's going to expect, you'll have to rummage through the various tutorial sections - and there's no index to help you. For £70, you might expect something a bit better. VERDICT
|
