10. .OR. is another way to describe the desired facts. LIST FOR SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .OR. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would indicate you wanted to see records involving either Babbitt or a loan of $70,000.
11. LIST FOR .NOT. SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ could help weed from view, or the files, all records involving Babbitt.
12. Command files are programs that tell the machine how to manipulate the data so you needn’t repeat complicated procedures one by one. You might work out these files to simplify your secretary’s work—or he or she might do the same for you.
Bowie and Grimes mastered dBASE II basics in eight hours of classes at Clinton Computer. “dBASE II was real easy,” he said. “The manual is in plain English. Even without all our records in the computer now, it saves me and Julie probably five or six hours a week. We were doing it manually before, and we’re on the verge of saving other people in the company lots of time with the loan processing by using dBASE II. I think we’d have to say with five hundred houses in our backlog there is the potential for this to save us $50,000 a year in carrying charges that may have accrued under the old system of keeping loan-processing records.
“We are going to buy another machine,” Bowie said, “for the Northern Division.”
The potential $50,000 annual savings from the two machines, by the way, would include just reductions in carrying charges—not in executive time or tasks besides loan processing. Consider the economies that would result simply from less paperwork.
“When we first set up the computer,” Bowie said, “we set it up exactly like we were doing things manually. As a division manager, I’m in charge of marketing and production. And earlier we had (1) marketing reports, (2) production reports, and (3) reports combining highlights of each for me to determine whether to start houses and things like that. But now all three categories appear on one loan-processing form.”
dBASE II (or the new dBASE III) may not work for you. But for Bowie it was a dream program through which he could store and retrieve records quickly and conveniently for any one of many purposes. He might set up his records mainly for loan processing. But the “SALE:PERSN” field, combined with the “SALE:PRICE” one, could tell him which outside sales reps were selling the most expensive homes. In other words, the loan-processing data base was one good way to keep track of the salesmen catering most successfully to the $135,000 buyers. For who cared what Bowie called his data base—“Loan Processing” or “Sales”? The point is, he could follow the salesmen’s performance, too, through cross-references between fields. dBASE II was a treasure trove of information about trends, sales, or otherwise.
“The problem,” said Bowie, “is that dBASE II would work fine with my budget summaries for my houses, except they require sixty fields and dBASE II is limited to thirty-two. So Sue suggested the Multiplan spreadsheet program. Multiplan is easy to use, even easier than dBASE II. Julie got started with Multiplan with just fifteen minutes of instruction.”
Multiplan works on the same idea as the better-known VisiCalc program, which, like WordStar, has sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies.