Promise Unfulfilled

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The preamble of Multibase claims that it allows you to create and manipulate a variety of multi-record files to suit your own needs, and is ideal for keeping all your personal records.

All of which sounds very promising.

The main program loads after a short title page and displays a menu giving nine options, to create, display, search, alter, save, load or add to a file, to delete a record or to dump a file.

These options often form the heart of a database but Multibase from G. Soft (Micro Software) offers nothing more, and has some serious omissions.

For a start there is no star command facility. One of the most serious drawbacks is the lack of a sort facility. Advanced features such as calculations are not supported at all.

Just to make matters worse there are some trivial but nevertheless annoying faults and bugs. One of the more serious is that you cannot specify the name under which you save the data.

This may seem unimportant until you realise that you have to specify the name when you come to load the file back in!

Adding to a file is cumbersome in that it allows you to type in a string of any length, then checks the length. Deleting a file is very unprofessional since it doesn't tell you what you're about to delete.

Hasn't the author ever heard of the term "user-friendliness"? Other little niggling faults include the untidy prompts, non-masking of lower case and the very uninformative instruction booklet.

Shingo Sugiura