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AW+ and Mail What?

Jimmy Boyce (CACE)

Well folks, I hope this makes it by deadline as I forgot to write this
article until the last minute. No, not procrastination, just plain forgot.

With all those great American novels we have written, edited and spell
checked, we now need to send them to someone.  What's more, we don't need
all of those publisher's addresses lying about on scraps of paper that
might get lost. Then, we would miss sending our manuscripts to the one
publishing house that would have published our literary work of art.

So, let's think computer and not let our hours of seaching for those
addresses go to waste. Let's save them in a nice neat file that can be
retrieved at any time. That is a database (that is "computerese" for a
list) and using it to print labels is known as MAIL MERGE.

A database is just an organized list of anything -- friend and relative
addresses for holiday card sending, your favorite records, tapes, CDs or
whatever. I have my library in a database. During this section of the AW+
tutorial, we will eventually cover all of AW+'s database features and you
will discover that it is easy and fun. The part I like is creating the
format for my database and the rest becomes ho hum tedium...all of that
typing.

So, where is the logical place to start <pg 61>? Load AW+ and wait for the
menu. The last item on the left hand side is MAIL MERGE, so push the letter
'M'.  Now, as your good old drive churns, grinds and makes other obscene
noises, another menu comes up onscreen. Across the top it reads "22292
BYTES FREE" or some such number. That is how big you can make a file. Next
to this number is "255 RECORDS FREE."  That is how many, as in my case,
books I can list in a single file.

Now for the rest of the menu, rather than delve into a list with short
explanation as is done on page 62 of the manual, I elect to take each
section and go over it. What comes next is not going to make you happy but,
because I screwed up and I am late with this, I am stopping here and we
will take up in detail how to creat a database file next month.