ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MICROPENDIUM P.O. Box 1343 Round Rock TX 78680 Phone 512-255-1512 Internet jkoloen@io.com MICROREVIEWS for June 1994 Micropendium by Charles Good P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH 45894 ------------------- DOUBLE ENTRY BOOKKEEPING by Harold W. Evans I am not ideally qualified to review this software because I have never had the mundane job of keeping the of detailed financial records that are required to run a business. I did show this software to a factory manager who is a member of my local user group and he agreed with me that Double Entry seems quite comprehensive. You can, as the author does, keep financial records for an entire business using this software and your 99/4A computer. Name and address lists, ledgers, payroll records, accounts receivable and accounts payable are all covered by this one integrated package. A peek at the main menu will give you an idea of the broad scope of Double Entry. Here are your choices: "Journal Entries: 1- Daily or end of month; 2- Post to ledger accounts. Ledger Accounts: 3- Find, add, edit, delete; 4- Sort alphabetically; 5- Print all or balances; 6- Transfer balances to new disks. Open All Files: 7- Name/address & Ledgers. Other: 8- Payroll records; 9- Financial reports and Accts/Rec statements." You can print on screen or to a printer lists of accounts, the contents of an entire account, balances of accounts, and financial reports in a variety of formats. Up to 79 accounts receivable and payable can be tracked. A report from the accounts receivable files will age the accounts for 30, 60 and 90 days, which I believe is something no other 99/4A accounting software will do. About the only thing you can't print are checks (for payroll and accounts payable) and invoices. All the Double Entry software comes on a DSDD disk, and that is its main limitation. All its parts are written in extended basic, and you can't break it down so that it works effectively in single density format. You need a double density floppy controller to use Double Entry and you have to run the software entirely from floppy drives. All records, ledgers, etc are stored on other DSDD disks. The whole system uses 6 DSDD disks, the program disk and 5 records disks. You don't have to have all the disks on line simultaneously, which is good because TI systems support only 4 floppy drives. Disks are requested by disk name. For example, the screen may say "Requires diskette PR/ACCTS". You then put the disk named PR/ACCTS into any drive and press . The computer searches all drives until it finds the disk with the proper name and then reads needed data off of that disk. Because of searching for disks by disk name and because of the vast amount of data on all these disks, it would be difficult to run Double Entry from a Horizon Ramdisk. Double Entry is completely menu driven. I have not managed to crash the program. If it asks for a disk and I put in the wrong disk it will ask again. Ultimately you always get back to the main menu. Execution is slow. This is the fault of extended basic and all the disk switching. If you have a double density floppy controller and do business bookeeping then you should give Double Entry a try. It costs only $10, which includes postage. There is no other financial package for our computer that is as inexpensive and as comprehensive. Send your $10 to Dr. Harold Evans, 293 Circle Hills Dr., Grand Forks ND 58201. And now, three new software packages for manipulating text files. First and most important: ------------------- FUNNELWEB v5.01 EDITOR by Tony McGovern The best keeps getting better. This latest enhanced editor runs out of the Funnelweb v4.4 system. Substitute the new editor files for your existing ED/EE files on your Funnelweb disk. For 40 column users we now have optional column by column left/right scrolling. Just press CTRL/= to toggle back and forth between 20 column windowing (the way 40 column TI Writer has always been) and scrolling one column at a time. Column scrolling is active when you use the arrow keys and when you are typing text. When you column scroll to the right margin the cursor then drops down a line and starts again at the left margin. For both 40 and 80 column users we have -ta da- right margin justification directly from the editor. You see right justification on screen and print it out justified with PF directly from the editor. You won't have to use the formatter any more just to get right justification. Justification is done with an alternate type of reformat. Ctrl/2 does the normal, non justified, reformat as always. Ctrl/R reformats from the cursor position with right justification. This has to be done one paragraph at a time. Position the cursor at the beginning of each paragraph. If you want to maintain paragraph indentation press Fctn/2 (insert). Then press Ctrl/R and the whole paragraph is reformatted and justified. There is a big new feature for 80 column users, and I do mean BIG. You get a 64K text buffer capable of holding in active memory a text file well in excess of 300 disk sectors. Even MYWORD on a Geneve doesn't have a text buffer this big! And you can put an equally big text file into a second 64K view only buffer and then you can cut and paste between these two files. You can mark up to a screen full of text (from 1-23 continuous text lines) from either the view only buffer or the edit buffer and place this text in a "clipboard". The contents of this clipboard can then be inserted anywhere into the edit buffer. I used this editor to create the 200-300+ sector Sherlock Holmes story text files I described in last month's microreview. The v5.01 80 column editor only works with systems that have the full 192K video ram in their 80 column device. All Mechatronics and TIM 80 column peripherals have this. Some AVPC cards and Geneve computers may not. If you have "only" 128K video ram in your 80 column system you need to use the previous v5.00 80 column Funnelweb editor. If you are in the unfortunate situation of having a less than fully upgraded 80 column device, take heart in the fact that there is something 80 column v5.00 can do that v5.01 can't. V5.01 has lost the capability of switching between 80 and 40 column displays. These new editors are sharware. If you like the new features, send the Funnelweb authors some additional money. You can get from me the new v5.01 editors to try in any of three formats: 1- The complete v5.01 80 column upgrade on a DSSD partially archived disk that you add to your Funnelweb v4.4 system disk. 2- The complete v5.01 40 column upgrade on an unarchived DSSD disk that you add to your v4.4 system disk. 3- An unarchived flippy disk that contains on one side a stand alone SSSD version of Funnelweb that requires no configuration, has the basic v4.4 system files, disk review, and the v5.01 40 column editor with all chars graphics and 3 languages. This stand alone mini version of Funnelweb will run directly as DSK1.LOAD and has the new editor's documentation on the flip side of the disk. I'll send you the new v5.01 editor in any or all of these 3 formats for $1 each. ------------------------ FUNNELWEB TEXT SORT by Bob Carmany This is based on code originally published by Bruce Harrison. The code has been modified by Bob to run out of the Funnelweb environment, hence the name. It only runs from a Funnelweb loader or menu and preserves the Funnelweb kernel (including the "Work File" name used with LF/SF in Funnelweb's editor) Text Sort sorts a DV80 file alphabetically by treating each text line as a separate record for sorting. Groups of text lines are sorted based on the letter(s) at the start of each text line. You are asked for the input file name and the name of the sorted file. Text Sort is very fast. Bob uses it to sort his "user" SPELL-IT dictionary. I use it to sort text lines containing student names followed by their grades in the biology courses I teach. Text Sort is public domain. I will send it to you with fully commented source code on a SSSD disk for $1 or you can contact the author directly. Bob Carmany, 1504 Larson St., Greensboro NC 27407. -------------------------- REFORMAT by Bruce Harrison Several years ago Jim Peterson wrote an extended basic text reformatter that would format any DV80 text file to the user's choice of line width with correct work wrap (no splitting words between lines) and with or without right justification. It workes nicely, but it is slow. Bruce Harrsion has created a similar DV80 REFORMATter that runs at assembly speed. Reformt loads from extended basic or from EA5. Simply enter the input file name, output file name, line width, left margin, and whether or not you want right justification. Press and away you go! Reformat is fast. Text is displayed on screen as it is being reformatted, and it really zips by quickly, particularly if the input and output files are on a ramdisk. Normally paragraphs are right justified except for the last line, which is recognized by a carriage return control character at the end of the paragraph. Reformat also right justifies reasonably well with files that have no control characters (no cr's) because you can specify that lines ending in a period should not be right justified. Text files of any length can be reformatted with Reformat because the entire file doesn't have to be in memory all at once. If you take me up on my offer made last month for all the Sherlock Holmes stories in DV80 format, you can reformat these large Holmes files to 40 column width. The resulting reformatted text is very easy to view on a 40 column display without extra blank lines and without words being split between lines in odd places. Reformat is public domain. Mail me $1 and I'll send it to you on a SSSD disk complete with source code and Bruce's very user friendly instructions.