★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ 007 Superfile 2 & Listfile 3 ★ |
| Superfile - Listfile (Amstrad Action) | Applications Bureautique |
ZX-Guaranteed? That sounds like a contradiction in terms to me. What it really is is Geoff Bobker's Lancashire firm producing good utility software cheaply. Having bitten on the Spectrum software scene, his attention is now pointed at the Amstrad. 007 Superfile 2 and Listfile 3 are both supplied on one tape for one price. They are two separate databases - programs that store one large block of information and let you categorize this information however you want and differ in their capabilities and uses. Superfile is similar to a card-index system. It can store up to 500 different cards (called records). On each you have up to nine different fields: one of these is a sort field (more of that later) and the other eight can hold a line of wnnen notes, up to 25 letters long. Say you wanted to store all the members in a club. Each member would have a separate record. On all records, the first full field would have the member's name, the second the address, the third the telephone number, and so on. Memory limit If you need to use all eight fields on each record and fill them to capacity, the program will run out of memory after 106 have been entered. After this, you would need to start a fresh database. You can categorize each record by the sort code. To the machine, this is just a single letter or number, but you could assign a different meaning to the code. For instance you decide to split up the club into life members and people who subscribe. The life members have a son code A, and the subscribers have B. If you want to print out a list of subscribers, simply tell the computer tc print out all records with a sort code of B. Up to 62 categories car be used. Listfile is far less flexible. It simply stores up to 1,000 records each of which is just one line long. This is for a simple index of a large collection which does not require a large amount of information to be stored in each record, for example, a list of all the Amstrad programs you own. Fast searches Both of the programs let you display records, search for strings and print out individual or groups of records. Most of the programs are written in unprotected Basic. The search routines, however, are implemented in machine-code, and so are relatively fast. Now to the fly in the ointment. The manual for these programs is muddy to say the least. Prepositions seem to have been lifted oui of their positions and thrown into a black hole. The worst offendei is this: "...CALL POLICE by entering GOTO 999." If. after reading that, you should type CALL POLICE, the machine resets and loses all your precious data. I will grant you that the manual is intelligible but I think manuals should reduce head-scratching, not increase it Verdict: For this price, the programs themselves are average in terms of money versus performance. The manual should be properly edited. If you want to see what a database is and how they work, for no great price, this is not a bad buy. If you want to have some power behind your database. I suggest you look elsewhere.
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