★ APPLICATIONS ★ DIVERS ★ PERSONAL ASSISTANT ★ |
| Personal Assitant (Amstrad Action) | Applications Divers |
Personal Assistant sets out to provide you with a suite of useful business programs: o word processor, database, desk diary, invoice processor, label printer and bank account manager. It tries to do this under CP/M Plus on the CPC 6128 or PCW 8256. Unfortunately, for several reasons, it falls short of the mark. THE MANUAL This is the first and main reason the package doesn t really succeed. The A5 booklet covers all six applications in 50 pages, which is not really enough. as some sections are skimped. BILLMATE This program prepares invoices and statements to send to your customers. As you enter the quantity and price of each item on an invoice, Billmate works out the VAT amount and the running total. When you've finished entering data, which you can't edit within the æAddinvoice' routine, you caii store the invoice on disc. BANKMATE This program is a convenient way of storing your personal bank account (or company account, if the company's small). It allows you to enter each amount spent and eamt and will keep a current balance for you. APPOINTMATE If you use a desk diary to make a note of your appointments, then you may find Appomtmate a helpful alternative. It stores details of up to 930(!) appointments and can display the data in several ways. DATAMATE This is the database program, and is quite sophisticated. A record is designed by typing field names directly onto a screen 'card', and the length of each field is defined by the number of spaces after its name. You can store about 600 records of300 characters on a single disc side. You can also sort the records by any field and make calculations between them. You could have a product file with a VAT exclusive price in one field, the VAT rate in another, and the calculated total in a third. Totals can also be carried from one Datamate can print out single records, which may be more than one screenful, or the whole file, via extra æformats'which can be defined and stored separately. This technique allows all kinds of lists and reports to be produced from your files. You can also merge Wordmate text with your datafile to print forms or circulars. Default printer settings are for a Tatung TP100 printer (a what?). MAILMATE This is a fairly basic program to handle mailing lists. You can enter, view, search, sort, and print lists of names and addresses, or sets of labels. WORDMATE Personal Assistant's Word Processor is not up to the standard of Wordstar, nor Tasword. It is quite sufficient for typing letters, but not really up to long reports, written quotations or magazine articles. Blocks of text may be defined, and then moved, copied or deleted in one operation. Text may be searched for given words, and replaced by others if required. Margins can be set and the text broken into pages at any point, or automatically after a set number oflines. Wordmate doesn't support repeated headers or footers, page numbering or double spacing, but can be made to use some printer effects, such as emphasised or condensed print. NEW VERSION It's only fair to mention that FMP have released a modified version of Personal Assistant in the month since they sent this copy for review. They claim to have made æminor adjustments'. There wasn't time to check this new version, but some of the problems found in this copy, which was not a pre-release version, may have been removed.
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