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Having pretty well saturated the market for Dragon games, Microdeal is now extending its range of more serious programs with oddly-named filing system.

Filmastr is available on cassette or disc; I tested the cassette version. It comes with an A4 loose-leaf file of instructions containing 16 pages, so there is plenty of space for the details of your files.

You can design your own screen "form" on which to enter data, with up to 20 data fields. This has to be saved on cassette then re-loaded before you can go on with the program, a procedure which caused me considerable problems. Then you can enter your records, 200-300 of them, depending on size. The keyboard response during this stage seemed to be even slower than usual for the Dragon. You have to type very slowly to avoid letters being missed.

Records can be sorted and selected on any field or combination of fields, you can sum the contents of any numerical field, and the records can be printed out in any format.

Quite a powerful program for its price, despite being less easy to use than one might wish.

M.N.