Beta-Base Gets a Boost

Clares are branching out into accessories for Beta-Base and the seven programs on their Beta-Base Utilities disc will be of interest to all BB owners.

Two give Beta-Base entirely new features and the rest extend existing options.

Mail-Merge is the more important of the two new modules. Up to 16 fields can be inserted into an Ascii file prepared on a word processor such as View or Wordwise. The document is then automatically formatted before printing.

Compared with full mail shot programs, Mail-Merge offers only rudimentary facilities, but it is simple to handle, and is adequate for occasional use.

H-C Status is the other new module. It prints out the specification of a datafile with information on its fields and the number of records used and deleted. Your guess is as good as mine as to what H-C stands for.

Search+ is a considerable improvement on the standard option. For example, you can have up to nine strings in a search instead of five, and logical OR can now be used in search criteria combinations.

Search string length is increased from 10 to 20 charac ters, and the string can include wild cards. You can also search whole records without specifying fields. Finally, an interrupt facility generates a pause every time a match is found, during which the record can be printed or deleted from the final list.

Extended Label Printer too, has more and better features than its Beta-Base original. It will print up to three labels across the sheet instead of two, replace blank fields by the next line of the address, intelligently split a field that is too long then re-position the record accordingly and it will save and load print formats.

Disc Sort (single and double drive) can operate on any size of file, unlike the Beta-Base Sort which is limited to 500 records.

It also gives the option of ignoring upper and lower case, the lack of which can be an irritating restriction.

The double-drive version will work on two copies of a file simultaneously.

But the new utility will sort only into ascending order, so it doesn't quite make the original obsolete.

With the upgraded version of the standard Transfer facility you can transfer fields in any order from one file to another without necessarily maintaining compatibility between field types.

But there is no additional error-checking, so if, for exam ple, you transfer a string to a numeric field, the string will be evaluated as zero, unless it begins with a +, a — or a digit.

Fast Pack is twice as fast as the normal compaction routine. There is nothing revolutionary about any of these utilities, but they do improve the Beta-Base performance. The only real problem is that they are called from a menu which must be loaded separately from Beta-Base itself.

> For some operations this means constantly having to change between the system disc and the utilities disc.

Nevertheless, the package represents a bold and praiseworthy experiment. All the utilities have been written by genuine Beta-Base users, who are after all the best people to judge what is required.

The result is that there are minor inconsistencies in screen presentation between modules, and a manual of patchy quality. But these things hardly detract from such a good idea.

Gabriel Jacobs