A common criticism of people not used to the delights of computing is that computers are nothing more than expensive toys which, if you are really pushed to justify, might just be used to sort out home finances and the like. Of course, they always add with an air of having won the argument; you could do it with a pencil and the back of an old envelope. But of course.

What then would they make of Scratchpad, an ideas organiser for the Beeb? A facility fairly .common on machines like the Apple or the Mac, this is really just pencil and paper writ large - a selfcataloguing aid to the flow of ideas that usually get lost precisely because they are on scraps of paper. Supplied on disc, you use the program to enter up to 40 ideas (200 with the 6502 Second Processor) in one of 20 cells or in a general catch-all cell area. Once ideas have flowed (and the utility in use positively encourages you to keep thinking and not worry about how to store ideas) you can then enter each cell in turn and start sorting the ideas.

This you can do in various useful ways: ideas can be altered, entered, deleted, swapped between cells, edited, changed in order or indented to show the structure of a run of ideas. At your leisure, you can arrange an order to your earlier random ideas - as well as returning at a later date to idea cells stored on disc. Finally, the structured ideas can be printed in your chosen format or inserted as a file into the word processor View.

I found Scratch pad very useful and can see myself returning to it again and again - of course, I do a fair amount of writing. There are some minor quibbles about it, however; the main ones from my point of view being the lack of an option to create a Wordwise file and the price which, I'm afraid, will limit its market. Something this useful and easy to use really ought to do well - despite the doubters with their pencils and papers.

D.R.