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could see at a glance what function key
brought up which menu, it's frustrating to
go through them all every time you want
to do something. I suppose if you were
really bothered you could always stick a
bit of paper over your function keys.
When you have finished typing your
latest novel you can have a look at what
the page layout looks like with the view
function, This 'draws a picture of every
page with each letter being represented
by a dot. This does come in very useful
when things need to be positioned
correctly, it may even help you to spot
your mistakes in the layout.
Of course all of the normal printer
facilities such as underlining and spacing
are catered for, though headers and
footers are dealt with in a strange way. Not
only do you have to tell I lometext where a
heading starts you must also tell it where
the heading finishes. This means that it is
possible to have headers that run over
more than one line of the paper when
printed. I must admit this did leave me a
little confused at first as I didn't tell the
program where my header finished the
first time that I tried to use this function.
The view option showed that something
was amiss and I was able to correct the
problem before I sent the document to
the printer, I told you that view was
handy.
Homefind - the database is a little
strange. In case you have never used a
database I should explain how you would
normally use one. Your computer is
treated as an electronic card index box.
You would set up a series of fields into
which you should enter information. You
can then ask the computer to find specific
information from what it has stored on
disk. An example of a layout for a database
may be:
NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
You can no doubt see where the
similarity to the old card-index comes in.
Well, Hometind is totally different Yes, it
is still used for information storage and
retrieval but there is no fixed format as to
what can be entered into the system. For
example a few entries to the database may
be:
Fred's Birthday's August 23rd
jim's Birthday's June 5th
Fred's Address's 123 Main Street
As you can see you almost talk to the
computer, and any information can be
stored. Once the information has been
stored you can ask questions such as:
What's Fred's Address?
And the answer will appear as if by magic.
There is no provision within the
program for getting printouts of specific
information though it is possible to keep a
printed copy of any 'conversations
. you that have with the computer. And of
course information can be stored on disk
for later inclusion in the wordprocessor.
Personally, I find this structure for a
database very restricting, I can't see any
way that you could use the program to run
a mailing list or store information about a
record collection. Even so the program is
very clever and great fun to use. No dou bt
many people will love the 'friendliness' of
the program and use it for just those
things that I said I couldn't see a way of
doing.
IP
Hometerm I consider to be one of the
most important things about this
program. Modems are becoming cheaper
all of the time and more and more people
are becoming interested in communicating
via computer. Before I go any
further it is worth stressing that this
program is a terminal emulation program
which can be used to access bulletin
boards and systems such as Telecom Gold.
It is not a Viewdata type system and
cannot be used with systems such as
Prestel or Compunet.
With Hometerm and an RS232 modem
it is possible to talk to your friends who
have this software and modems, swap
programs with each other and talk to each
other via your computer keyboard. Many
of the bulletin boards now have Commodore
sections on them so you can ask
questions to other people who use the
system etc. In fact the day of the electronic
office is here. One person can write
an article using Hometext. Send it to
someone else via Hometerm and they can
then print it out using Hometext
For the more technical bods out there
the following data formats are catered for,
ASCII, CBM (commodore characters),
Vidtex and the very popular )(modem.
32
One handy facility that the program
has is that of Macros. It is possible to set up
a file that holds information such as your
name, and your password. These macros
can then be used to send the information
required to the computer saving you a lot
of typing if you access a particular system a
lot.
Not much more can be said about
these packages. They are all very good
and would be worth a look at if the asking
price was just for one of them. As I have
said I found Homefind a little limiting but
no doubt others will love it. All of the
programs are well presented and easy to
use. If you need any of the programs then
the package is well worth the price even
though some of the 'polish' may be
missing that its more expensive,
individual program, competitors have,
All in one
The other package mentioned is Team-
Mate. What makes this program stand out
from the rest is the fact that it is possible to
have all of the programs in memory at any
one time. Obviously, this means that you
are limited to how much space is available
at once for a specific task. Team-Mate gets
around this in a very clever way, It allows
you to choose, upon loading the software,
exactly what you want in memory. Below
is the menu presented when you load the
software:
(1) Desktop (3 prgs)
(2) Plus Graph (1 prg)
(3) Write File (2 prgs)
(4) Home Office (2 prgs)
(5) Utilities