BASIC BASE Despite their revered status amongst BBC owners and very high quality releases for that machine, Beebugsoft have come up with a remarkably average and unexciting database for the Amstrad. It's quite a workmanlike program and easy to use and I daresay that many people will appreciate it purely on that basis; however, if your requirements are ambitious or sophisticated you would do well to look elsewhere. It is a fixed field database; before entering data you have to specify how much room to allocate for each particular category, which can be either restrictive or wasteful on memory space. There is a limit of 25 characters maximum for each field and of 2000 data items, eg, 200 records of 10 fields, 100 records of 20 fields, etc.
Screen output is in a rigid and predefined form and although printer width can be altered and labels produced, there is no real formatting or report generating options. Still, if your requirements do not exceed these features, then you will find it able to perform all the necessary functions of a database, sort in order, search the file for given entries - including strings held anywhere within a given field, display and edit selected fields. Tony Kendle, PCW |
