Educational Software Cooperative 4

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Text File | 1995-04-10 | 14.2 KB | 293 lines

-----Perfect Recall DEMO----- The DEMO setup provides a means of working with the program as if it were fully installed to manage an architect's or engineer's office. The printed documentation for this contains several graphics per page, making it significantly easier to follow. This can be ordered using the BUYER.EXE program. Start the demonstration. If you are running from a CD simply start Perfect Recall and select DEMO. If running from a hard disk, start the program using the command PR DEMO. Note the space between PR and DEMO. To demonstrate finding an existing letter we will pretend that you operate a professional office and created the DEMO setup to handle various files. In the normal course of most jobs you typically write five or six letters. We will imagine that at some point you began to have a problem with relocating old letters and documents in a timely manner, so you employed Perfect Recall to help. Suppose you have done a number of jobs someone named Mike Davis. Now a question has come up about an old job on Lolita Lane concerning some changes to the driveway design. You have a vague recollection of having written Mike a letter that addressed the driveway in question. How are you going to find this old letter ? -----Using the category tree structure----- Each letter has a database entry containing descriptive information. These database entries are called records. These records are pre- organized into manageable groups called categories. You are about to begin stepping through the Demo setup's Category Tree Structure in search of a category that might contain letters. NOTE: The categories shown here are only a demo setup. When you configure your own setup, you can use whatever categories suite your needs. Of the four main categories that appear on the start-up screen, the "BUSINESS" category is the most logical place to start. Press 2 to enter the BUSINESS category use the down arrow key to highlight 2 and RETURN. (Enter key) The program immediately responds by moving to the "BUSINESS" category and displaying additional subcategories which further subdivide all business material into smaller groups. The subcategory "JOB LETTERS" is the next most likely place to go, since we are looking for a letter. Press 5. You have now left the Category Tree Structure portion of the program and are viewing a list of entries in the JOB LETTERS category. Each entry is called a record and is used to represent a letter. The actual letter files and applications are "attached" to these records. The screen that you are looking at now is called the Record List screen. It is a central part of the entire program. Each record is given one line across the screen to display as much of itself as it can. This part of the program allows you to read through the records to find a specific one. Let's narrow the list so that only those addressed to Mike appear on the screen. Press right arrow key such that MIKE is highlighted. A new menu appears at the bottom of the screen. Press RETURN to execute a search for the highlighted text MIKE. The screen should be displaying only those records where MIKE is entered under the First NAME heading. In this program the word heading is used to refer to database fields. Reading down the list under the SUBJECT Heading we can see that line 2 mentions something about a driveway. As was said before, this Record List only shows as much of each record as would fit on a single line across the screen. Now we want to see the full contents of record on line 2. Press 2. (or highlight 2 and press RETURN) You are now seeing the entire record and not just the first four Headings. The text at the bottom tells us that this letter concerns a driveway design. Having found the correct record, the letter itself must be loaded into our word processor of choice. Unfortunately this is only a demo program and it is not possible to include an entire word-processing program. There is, however, a small program provided to demonstrate how an application program would be loaded. Press the up arrow key so that the filename DEMO.LTR is highlighted. The box on the screen is telling you that it intends to read the file DEMO.LTR from the B drive and load it into the Viewfile program which is actually just one of Perfect Recall's internal services but the idea is the same. Press RETURN. The VIEWFILE program will now run and display the contents of file DEMO.LTR as shown above. Now exit VIEWFILE and return to Perfect Recall. Press ESC key. Control is passed back to Perfect Recall. Now exit all the way back out to the Perfect Recall main menu by repeatedly pressing the ESC key until "Perfect Recall" appears in upper left corner. The process that you just went through is typical of what it takes to find just about anything using Perfect Recall. * Go to the category that most likely contains what you are looking for. * Search for the entry (record) that appears to hold the what you want. * Launch application program Sooner or later you may decide to explore this demo setup on your own. If so, remember, there is little point in laboring to understand this particular setup. Your own setup may have little to do with your own needs. The only purpose of these demonstrations is to illustrate the program's capabilities. -----SECOND DEMONSTRATION----- The previous exercise explored how Perfect Recall retrieves files. While this is a valuable service it is nevertheless rarely necessary to use it. This program's real value shows up in its ability to serve as a non-programmable database. In this next exercise we'll see how information used to retrieve files can service many other needs. The DEMO setup is structured to serve the needs of a business that draws plans. A drafting firm might want to use Perfect Recall to keep track of filenames for computer-aided drawings. The records that Perfect Recall uses to keep track of the plans is a natural source of valuable information. Enter the BUSINESS subcategory starting from the main menu of the DEMO program. Enter the PLANS category found by highlighting 2 and press RETURN. Here we see a list of the first fifteen records in the Plan database. Let's take a look at the whole record for the first entry in the list. Press RETURN At the top of the screen it shows: Filenames: 15-03.CAD DTSH-1.CAD This record can load two different filenames. Filename 15-03.CAD is the drawing of the building and file DTSH-1.CAD is the detail sheet. You can switch between these two filenames using the left/right arrow keys. If you do this now you will find that each filename has a different description attached to it. Records can hold as many filenames as you feel belong together and each filename will load itself into the appropriate application program. Which files you choose to group together under one record is entirely up to you. While we are here, notice that heading 7 has a diamond following the heading title. This indicates that an equation automatically generates this entry. If you were to change the value entered under the COST heading you would find that heading 7 would automatically change as well. In the next step we'll see why this is a valuable feature. Go view the last records. Press ESC to exit this record and return to the Record List screen. Press PgDn or End key. Now we are at the bottom of the list. Here the program has generated an average of all entries under heading 7. The result is (0.65). Without any extra work we now know that the average cost of all the plan work we've done so far is $0.65 per-square-foot. This is very useful for bidding. If we do a search we can generate additional information about a specific plan types. Let's narrow the list so that it only includes two-story buildings. Press the right arrow key until the highlight is under the heading (STORY), then press the down arrow key until the number 2 is highlighted in line 25. Press the RETURN key. Narrowing the list has caused the average cost- per-square-foot figure to be automatically recalculated. Now we can see that two-story buildings cost $1.16 per-square-foot, rather than $0.65. The nice thing about this is that we are acquiring this information as a natural by product of just using Perfect Recall to retrieve files. Exit back out to the start-up screen. Press ESC key until "Perfect Recall" appears in the upper left corner. In this exercise we have seen how a database that is used to retrieve files can also provide other valuable services that would normally required a separate program. -----THIRD DEMONSTRATION----- The previous discussion showed how a record is used to store filenames and general information. Now we will see how a record can serve as a hub for accessing other records that contain related information. The Demo setup provides an example of this using the DRAWING JOBS category. An office using this demo setup would have a practice of creating a record in Perfect Recall for each job or case. This job record would serve the hub for all other related information. This is one of the significant features that distinguishes Perfect Recall from other database or file management programs. Without a diagram to illustrate what's happening in the following exercises things can get confusing. By two different methods we'll be starting from one record and momentarily jumping over to another related record and then automatically returning. Enter the BUSINESS category as before. Enter the DRAWING JOBS category. Press RETURN With the highlight on 1 to view the first record. This record accesses four filenames. Pressing the left/right arrow keys cycles through the descriptions attached to each filename. 187.JUR PROJECT JOURNAL 16-10.CAD BUILDING PLANS 1-87-S.CAD SITE PLAN 1-87-D.CAD PRELIMINARY DESIGNS This record can also access records in other databases and thereby extend the amount of information immediately available. One means of doing this is with the LINK feature, which ties this record to another specific record in some other database. In this example the heading BUILDER is tied to an entry in the address database. To activate the Link, press L while 1 is highlighted then press RETURN or just press ALT-L. Using the Link feature we have accessed Mike Davis's address and phone numbers. We can use this linking capability to tie Mike Davis's address to each job we are doing for him so that his current address only needs to be maintained in one place. Now let's return to the job record from which we came. Press ESC key. The Link feature connected us to one specific record in another database. There is another feature called Jump to Related which works a little differently. Jump to Related connects to another database and then does a search. Now we will use this to view all letters associated with this job. Press J. Initiating the Jump-to-Related process displays a list of categories to choose from. These have been pre-configured. Press RETURN to select Job Letters. The Jump-to-Related operation has been pre-set to find only those records that contain "1-87" under the JOB# heading in the JOB LETTERS category. We have the option of working on any one of the records found by the Jump-to-Related search. Upon leaving we will return to the job record from which we came. Press ESC key. Because we are working on jobs, there would of course be some billing associated with it. Billing could be handled manually or by an accounting program. Since accounting programs can be complicated and don't give very much flexibility in billing formats, most small businesses simply stay with some sort of manual approach. What these people really want is some way to use their word-processing program to write invoices their own way and yet still have the computer maintain a simple total of how much is due. Let's see how the Perfect Recall can be used to accomplish this. Access the Billing category and review Mike Davis's standing on this job. From the same Drawing Job record press J to again activate Jump-to-Related. Press right arrow key until BILLING is highlighted. Press RETURN key. Upon arriving in the billing database a search is automatically done for all 1-87 jobs. The billing category has been set up to display sum totals for AMOUNT, BALANCE, and PAYMENT. We can see that this job is paid in full. This setup enables invoices to be composed on a text editor while Perfect Recall tracks amounts due. Press ESC key to return to original Job record. Return to the main menu by pressing the ESC key until "Perfect Recall" appears in the upper left corner of the screen. Press Q to exit Demo program. In this exercise we saw how one record is used as a hub to access other related information. Of course the same information could have been found manually by navigating the category tree structure and then doing searches but the Link and Jump-to- Related features enables such things to be automated. The Link and Jump-to-Related features come in handy more often than you might think. For example with a To-Do list database. If a letter needs to be written then Link the To-Do record entry a Letter record. Same thing for documents or tieing an address to a To-Do list phone call entry. It is not feasible to provide documentation here on how to setup Perfect Recall for personal use. This can only be done by ordering the printed documentation using the BUYER.EXE program. Documentation may be purchased without registering Perfect Recall. Perfect Recall has a utility to assist in reading your existing files and automatically creating database entries for them. You may import any quantity of work using this utility without buying the software. Registration will be required when you've added 25-50 new records. Registration may be done in one or two parts. Either a single $80 purchase or $35 when 25-50 records exist followed by $45 when 150-200 records is reached.