The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Beginners' Basics: Part 4 Ron Wilby

I've had lots of phone enquiries about the main categories of application programs. In the first three episodes of this series, I promised several times to explain the terms word processor, database and spreadsheet. Let's do it (at last).

What's a Word Processor?

This is the easy member of the group to describe. It's a program for pushing words around, just like the name says. You want to write something, like a letter or one of these articles (helping Ron?), you get a word processor program to do it. This gives you a blank screen on which to do your writing. There is a flashing "cursor" to show you where the words you type will appear. You create a file, giving it a name, and type your story. Now, there's some things to learn (what, again?). A typewriter this is not! There is no real document existing until you save your work and then print it. What you see on the screen doesn't really exist at all. There are pros and cons here. The pros are that you can change anything on screen with no bother, just delete it or overwrite it as you wish. Completely ruin it and you'll still have a backup copy. No need for white paint or retyping, those days have gone. No document actually existed, only lots of electrons racing round inside your monitor, so you just push them into different patterns to change a letter or word. The big con is, if you switch off without "saving" your work (means writing it to your hard or floppy disk), you have lost it. Yes, all of it and forever.

Word Processor Features

Word Wrap. When you reach the end of a line in your typing, no need to put in a "carriage return" to move down a line. The word processor does all that for you, rearranging the words as it goes. So you can have a straight right edge to your typing or a ragged edge, whichever you like. You can change from one to the other and back again as often as you want. If you want a straight right edge, the spaces between words will be automatically adjusted to make it all fit. Magic! 

Cut and Paste. You can mark a block of your writing (on screen), which will show up as a different colour. You can then copy that block to another file, or move it to a different part of what you're working on. The copy operation leaves the original where it was, and you can then delete that if you wish. Anything you want to do with blocks of text, the program can do. I'm sure some writers of popular novels have a large stock of paragraphs. These they put together with a word processor to make up new novels endlessly, thus making lots of money in a short time. I tried this trick myself with some early episodes for PC Update. Unfortunately Peter Smith actually reads this stuff and he has a terrific memory, so he caught me cheating! (Ed - I'm still watching! PS) 

Search and Replace. Suppose you have to write a long document which contains the word "oxydimethylenechloride" about fifteen times on every page. If you're like me, you'll make fourteen spelling mistakes on every page, and also it takes time to type that long word. So don't type it, just type, say, "oxy". You can spell that, can't you? Then, when you've finished your document, you tell the word processor to "find and replace" all the occurrences of "oxy" with "oxydimethylenechloride". Magically, it does this in an instant, gets the spelling right every time and rearranges the lengths of each line, which would otherwise have been upset by adding that very long word. 

Checking Your Work. Every word processor has a spelling checker built in, but be aware that it's ability to clean up your mistakes is limited. "Wee mite sea watts their" would pass any spelling checker. Much more useful is a grammar checker, which would definitely not pass the above phrase. A thesaurus is another common feature, giving you suggestions for alternative words to brighten up your work. 

Formatting. You can have two or more columns, add graphics and tables, number pages and adjust margins or line spacing. You can have headers or footers for each page and adjust line spacing. There are many other features available, depending on the particular word processor you're using. 

There is a wide range of word processors available, starting with the rather basic Write that comes with Windows and many excellent shareware programs obtainable for modest registration fees. If you are really going to be a writer, then maybe you should aim for the highend offerings like MS Word, WordPerfect or Lotus' Amipro. These will cost you plenty but have features you'd never dream about. 

What's a Spreadsheet? 

In other days called a worksheet, an electronic spreadsheet is a very large sheet onto which data and calculations can be entered. What can you do with it? Well, for example, you can look after your personal finances, set up a budget, graph the performance of your investments and produce reports based on any type of data. You'd also find it useful for business, keeping wages and stock records for example. 

The Basics 

Your spreadsheet (remember it's electronic and has no real existence) is a "rectangle" divided into rows and columns. These divide the sheet into small rectangles called "cells." A cell is a box where you can enter data into your spreadsheet. A row is a horizontal line of these cells whereas a column is a vertical line of cells. Each cell has thus an address given by the intersection of the particular row and column. The columns are named by A, B . . . AA, AB . . . BB, BC and so on to a total of 256 columns (in my version of Lotus 1-2-3). The rows are numbered, starting with row 1 at the top and going down to row 8192. So the top left cell is called Al, the next column across B1. The bottom right of the sheet is IVS192. Yes, over 8000 rows, just as well it's electronic. 
If you printed all of that spreadsheet, it would cover your house! Total number of cells is over two million, but don't expect your PC to handle a completely filled sheet of this size. Thing is, you don't use every cell, only parts of the sheet, but the large size gives you flexibility.

Formulas and Functions 

Into each cell you can enter a label, a number, or a formula. A label is a heading used to identify parts of the information on the sheet while a formula enables you to do calculations on the numbers you have entered into various cells. A simple example is cell C8 = A6 + B7. Here the sheet calculates the value to be put in cell C8 by adding the data in cell C8 to that in cell B7. You can subtract, multiply or divide also. Functions give you another way of relating the contents of two or more cells. You can sum a range, average a range or use specific functions like calculating the square root of the number in a cell and placing it somewhere else. There are financial, statistical, trigonometric and logical functions available. Many other special functions enable you to do almost anything.

Automatic Recalculation 

If you change any of the data in your spreadsheet, the program will automatically recalculate all the results of all the formulas in the sheet. This leads to a very powerful tool, usually called "What-if Analysis." This means that you use the spreadsheet to answer questions like this.

"What-if we change the profit margin from 15 per cent to 10 per cent and as I result the sales volume increases by 7 per cent? To do this, you simply alter the appropriate figures and watch the program recalculate the answers. If you don't like them, no harm done, just go back to where you were and try again.

What Is a Database?

Any collection of information is a database. We all have them, they are called phone books, dictionaries or card indexes. An electronic database is a similar collection of information stored electronically in your computer.

Now take, for example, the phone book. It contains a vast amount of data, but you can't get at it. Because the phone book is indexed alphabetically on family names, that's all you can get from it. You can't get a list of all the people who live in Vermont or Bayswater or wherever. You can't get a list of all the people who have numbers beginning with 873.

The big advantage of the electronic database is that you can do any of those things and much more. You can get a list of all the people who live in Andrew St., Vermont, or if you like, at numbers less than 16 in Andrew St. Moreover, you can get that information in microseconds.

In fact, you can immediately sort, store, retrieve and print information from an electronic database in any way that suits you. Example: You have a database, kept on index cards, of all your customers. You want to send a staff member on a trip to see all the customers who are in Sydney. Therefore you need to go through all the index cards by hand, one at a time, to produce a special list. With an electronic database, the computer will find the information instantly. Having done that, it will do the same for all the customers in Toowoomba, or all the customers in Newcastle who bought brown Widgets last February.

Any of these lists can be printed, and you can use the report generating facility to design the form of the reports. One of the jobs my wife and I do is to keep a large database for an Association. A frequent task is to send letters to remind people they haven't paid their dues. Our database, using Paradox, makes this easy. We tell it to make a list of all those whose subs expired last November. The report generator then prints address labels from that list and outputs information to our word processor. Then we can "merge print" the reminder letters we're going to send (merge print means putting a different name and address at the beginning of a letter so that it looks as though it is specially written).

Making Directories

That's enough rattling on by me about "theory" matters, now you can turn on your computer and do a bit of practical work.

First, get to your DOS prompt. How to do that? Look at Part 1 of this series, September 1994 issue, read your DOS manual, or look for on-screen instructions. With the DOS 5 or 6 shell, which puts a menu on the screen when you start up, you get the DOS prompt this way. Press F10 and followed by Enter, which gives you a drop-down File Menu. From that, select the Exit option, which is Alt+F4. All will disappear except for the prompt in the top left of your screen. It looks like C:\> with a blinking line (the cursor) after it. Got that? OK, off we go.

My prompt is C:\> (yours may be different - you can change it, but we'll leave that for another day). That shows me that the C: drive (my hard disk) is the default or current drive (means the one I'm working in). See Part 2 of this series (October 1994) for the meaning of default drive. That backslash (\) after the C: shows I'm in the root directory of C:. Every disk, hard or floppy, has at least one directory, called the root directory.

This is where all other files and directories are stored. So, at the DOS prompt, type TREE and press Enter. You should then see something like this:

If you have lots of directories, your tree command may result in the information scrolling off the screen. If so, start again, holding a finger over the Pause or Break key. A quick jab and the scrolling stops (on my computer, anyway).

Next month's special will be a full discussion of directories, and so to prepare you for that, our practical section this month.

Using Directory Commands

Now, lets make a new directory. We use the MKDIR command (usually abbreviated to MD). So, at the DOS prompt, C:\>, type

MD PUPPIES

and press Enter. Type

TREE

again, and you'll see that a new directory called PUPPIES has appeared.

Next, we'll change directory with the CHDIR (abbreviated to CD) command. At the prompt, type

CD \PUPPIES

and press Enter. Note that DOS isn't interested in whether you type that in capital letters or otherwise. This CD command may change your prompt, depending on the details of the startup files which were loaded into your computer, probably by someone else. In my case, the prompt would change to C:\PUPPIES>, showing me that my default directory is now PUPPIES, a subdirectory on drive C: But, even if your prompt doesn't change, you'll still have PUPPIES as your default directory. Now, we'll make some directories at a lower level. Use

MD C:\PUPPIES\TERRIERS  and 
MD C:\PUPPIES\BEAGLES

to create these new directories.

Type TREE at the C:\> prompt to see the results of your work. To make use of these new directories, you'd need some files in them, so copy some files from somewhere. You must give the full address of the directory where you want the files to go. Using the names above, if you wanted to copy the contents of the DOGS\BROWN directory to the new PUPPIES\BEAGLES directory, you could use the command COPY *.*, meaning copy all files (see Part 2 of this series). Do it thus:

Get into DOGS\BROWN directory by typing

CD C:\DOGS\BROWN

and pressing Enter, which changes you to that directory. Then the command is

COPY *.* C:\PUPPIES\BEAGLES

This copies all the files in C:\DOGS\BROWN to C:\PUPPIES\BEAGLES. Now type CD \PUPPIES\BEAGLES and press Enter, then type DIR and press Enter to discover what you have put in your new directory. Simple, wasn't it? You've made a directory and put files in it.

Removing Files and Directories

Since you were only practising, you probably don't want to keep the new directories. What to do?

In the days before DOS s.x, this was a tedious job. First you must delete all the files in the directory. So, use the CD command to get into the directory you want to remove, then type DEL *.* to delete all the files. You have to make sure

they're all gone, since DOS won't delete a directory with files in it. To dispose of your unwanted directory, make your default something else. You can't delete the one you're in, see? Easiest way is to type CD\, which gets you back to the root directory. Now, use another command, RMDIR, usually abbreviated to RD, to remove the unwanted directory. So, here it is again: 

CD PUPPIES\BEAGLES 
DEL *.* 
CD\ 
RD PUPPIES\BEAGLES 

and the BEAGLES subdirectory is all gone. But that still leaves the PUPPIES directory, so you'll have to use the RD command on that too, same as above. DOS s.x makes life much easier with a new command, DELTREE. In this case you'd just type DELTREE C:\PUPPIES and follow the on-screen instructions. Well, that's all for this month folks. Phone (03) 873 3624 for congratulations, complaints and names you might phone for help. See you next month . . . 

Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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