I have noted that none of the people who list their set up admit to owning or using Viewsheet (by Acornsoft) and no programs of interest have appeared where it was used as the base language.
To my knowledge, the powerful Maths and Trig facilities of the Elk's Viewsheet cartridge are one advantage that have never been publicised.
When you buy your cartridge or ROM, you get a comprehensive User Guide with it. Whereas the example sheets it uses for demonstrations are limited; there are detailed instructions on how to use Elk mathematics within a database itself, including a Relative facility, which can be used to operate through the full 256 items. You are also able to transfer parts or all of a chart across into View.
Way back in the 1950s, I got involved in working with alloys and their origins, etc. This led me to start building up what is now called a database.
Now that database was The Periodic Table and began in a small note book bought from Woolworth's for about 3d. It gradually built up over the years even though I was no longer involved with metallurgy.
Having got my Elk and expanded it a bit, I realised that Viewsheet would be useful to bring together all the data I had collected. Once in the computer - like Alice - it grew and grew.
Now I'm not going to try to thrust this database on anybody else as it will not be of interest to most people but a look at the potential of Viewsheet may give them ideas to create a different type of database of their own.
An example of a part of this chart is included on this disk. Both will only LOAD into Viewsheet but as they are both Printer Windows, you will be able to get hard copies from them. Both are done in Mode 3.
Stan Hardy
Viewsheet is very powerful. I tried it for a while to do my bookkeeping but I stopped because I couldn't get a Printer Driver to print sideways.
The chart of the Periodic Table is included in the Utilities directory and will load into Viewsheet very well.
1st December 1995