a new concept
from Quickview Systems
One of the common problems with many
databases is that they tend to have a fixed format that requires you to
adapt your methods to suit. More advanced programs like DBase allow a
greater flexibility but these programs are not easy to use for the
non-programmer and take many painstaking hours to set up. Quite often it
is easier to continue to use a manual system of index cards, particularly
with small databases, as many of you will have found out. Now with
Zoomracks you can have the best of both worlds.
Zoomracks works on a principle of index
cards with each card holding information in any format you wish to define.
Unlike other systems such as Atari's Home Filing Manager for the 8-bit
systems however, Zoomracks offers you almost unlimited flexibility and can
be adapted to hundreds of applications. Each of your cards is held in a
'rack'. You can define as many racks as you wish and save them to disk. Up
to 9 of these racks can be used at any one time, although individual racks
can be deleted and replaced. Each rack is displayed on screen with the
first line of each card showing for easy reference. A quick click of the
mouse zooms a chosen rack to full screen and you can then select a
particular card. Click on that and the card zooms to full screen for
viewing or editing. Each command is a toggle, so clicking again, or using
function keys, will return you to the previous state. After a while it is
amazingly easy to move around between different racks and cards.
The amount of information that can be held
on each card can range from a couple of words to literally pages of
information. Each card is divided into fields which you specify and which
can be easily changed, rearranged or deleted, even with information on the
card. Up to 27 fields can be used on each card and each field can have up
to 250 lines of 80 characters. What's more you don't have to define the
size of each field, just keep putting in information. If it gets to the
stage where you can't see all of the information in a particular field,
just click on the field and that will zoom up to full screen. As I sit and
write down the capabilities of the program I become even more amazed at
its flexibility. Any field can be edited at any time with the inbuilt word
processor which allows you to delete words, cut and paste and more. It is
fairly limited as a word processor but perfectly adequate for database
use.
Several racks at once
The cut and paste facilities can be
used on whole cards a well as fields. Any card can be easily and
quickly deleted copied or moved to another rack. Here lies one of
the real beauties of the system. Think of using an index card system
for, say, a list of club members who you want to canvass to help
organise a new event. There is no one common factor to select them,
you just know who might be interested and who is not. On a
conventional database such totally random choices are not always
easy to control and can only be achieved by having some sort of key
field which you can mark. Often if you forgot to include a spare
field when setting up the database, you have had it. With Zoomracks
you just set up a new rack, go down your main rack and copy cards
over at whim. You end up with a completely new database with the
minimum amount of effort. And if you should decide that you need
another field, just stick it in, anywhere! I don't know of any other
database that offers such complete flexibility.
There are going to be many features
of Zoomracks that I will not have space to cover but in addition to
those already specified, there are sorts available on any field,
cards can be printed individually or the whole rack can be printed
out. There are extensive macro facilities allowing up to 27 single
key macros to be defined, including auto-execute macros that will
load defined racks when booting up. The disk contains many examples
of pre-defined racks that can be used as is or that will give you
ideas for your own applications. These are simply loaded as required
from rack 0 which is always present and contains a directory of your
disk.
The range of use for Zoomracks is
probably wider than for any other database program and is amply
illustrated by the use of several racks to hold a full tutorial for
the program. This alone will demonstrate the power of the system and
is essential reading to enable you to get the best from the system.
Although supremely easy to use once
mastered, it must be said that there are a great number of commands
to be remembered, although no more than with a word processor, and
it will take several hours to become familiar with them. There are
one or two areas which I did not like such as the way in which
information has to be entered into cards. The TAB key must be used
to move from field to field and RETURN terminates all entry to a
particular card. This is particularly frustrating as it is almost
automatic to hit
RETURN when you have completed
something. If you have not finished a card you have to go back
through the edit procedure and TAB down and start again. Several of
the commands are extremely long winded and require repeated steps to
go into and come out of a procedure but will maybe become automatic
with time. At the beginning it is just a matter of trying to
remember everything although there are on-screen prompts and a help
facility to assist you.
There is no way that I have done
Zoomracks justice in this review, several more pages would be
required, so I can only repeat that this is the most flexible
database system I have ever seen. For a home user, in particular, it
will cope with every single information filing application you can
think of. Stick on your address book, telephone numbers, record
catalogue, recipes, important reminders, kids homework, your diary
and anything else you can think of. Zoomracks can cope with it all.
It really is an amazing system.
Zoomracks has been extensively
reviewed in various newsletters in the States following a
promotional campaign by Quickview Systems and they have all raved
over it. Quite frankly I get sceptical when reading certain reviews
because I know some reviewers don't like to criticise when they have
been given a free copy of an expensive program but in the case of
Zoomracks every word of praise is justified. It's a new computer
concept that surely must change the way databases are used. I
challenge you to find a single program that gives you a more
comprehensive way to use your ST to keep track of your life.
Zoomracks is distributed in the U.K.
by Silica Distribution Ltd. so it should be available from your
usual retailer.
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