Do you have a small business and want to get your customer addresses organized? Do you wish you could ease the tedium of addressing your Christmas cards? Do you want to keep track of your old college buddies? If so, Address Manager could be just the thing for you!
What is Address Manager?
Address Manager is a simple menu- and window-driven database which can handle up to 1000 addresses. It supports 40 different groups to make sorting easier. You can print reports, and of course, labels.
There is also an extensive online help system available; go to the Apple menu and select HELP. You'll see a very pretty menu bar to tell you that you're in the help mode. Every menu item you access or field that you click on will give you a brief explanation of its function. To exit the Help section, select Quit Help in the Apple menu.
Getting Started.
After you click on run Address Manager -- click to get past the start-up screen. Go to the file menu and select NEW. You'll be prompted to enter a name for the new database. Enter a descriptive name and press RETURN.
Now, you'll see a blank page with the following fields: First Name, Last Name, Street 1, City, Phone, Date of Birth, Group 1, and Function. There are also three buttons: Fast Search, Search and Enter Record.
To start entering data: Click on the Enter Record button and you'll see a new blank screen with all the old fields along with these new ones: Street 2, State, ZIP, Group 2, Remark, and Title. There will only be two buttons: Cancel and Store.
Entering Addresses.
The insert cursor will be in the First name area. Enter a first name. There are three ways to get to the next field. Pressing "RETURN" moves you to the next field; the cursor appears wherever it was the last time you were in that field (usually at the end of any text). Pressing TAB moves you to the next field with the entire new field contents highlighted; if you type anything, the old contents will be replaced. Moving the mouse pointer into any field box and clicking will put the cursor wherever you clicked in the selected field. (To move backwards one field, use Open-Apple TAB or Open-Apple RETURN.)
Enter a last name and move on to fill in as many of the other fields as you need. For completeness, here are the specifications for all the fields:
Name: The first and last name can each be 20 characters. The name is used as a key for Fast Search.
Street (1 and 2): Allows you to have two lines of 30 characters each for the street address(es).
City: The city can be up to 20 characters long and is used in conjunction with the state and ZIP when searching.
State: State abbreviation (e.g. FL, LA, IL, TX, etc)
ZIP Code: The ZIP code can be either 5 or 9 digits. If using the 9 digit code, it must be formatted as 12345-6789.
Phone Number: There can be two (home and work, for example) 15 digit phone numbers.
Date of Birth: It supports three formats DD.MM.YYYY, MM.DD.YYYY and YYYY.MM.DD. Be sure to enter all dates in the same database the same way!
Group: A group, for example, would be "Acct". All the people in accounting would then have "Acct" in their group field. A record can be in none, one or two groups. A group can be 5 characters long. The group field is the other key for Fast Search.
Function: 30 characters describing what the person does (e.g., president, programmer, cashier, clerk, etc).
Remark: 30 character comment about the person (e.g., Apple IIgs owner).
Mr., Mrs., Ms. and none: How the person should be addressed, or in the case of a company, none.
How to keep your data.
When you are completely finished filling out all of the fields for one record, click on the STORE button. Store (control-S) saves the current database to the disk. It can only be used after creating, duplicating or modifying a record. If you do not STORE, any changes will be lost immediately!
STORE or CANCEL will put you back at the main screen, where you see the Fast Search, Search and Enter Record buttons.
Search and Fast Search.
To explain the major difference between Search and Fast Search, you need to know that an entire database is always available on disk, but that the same database may be too large to fit into memory all at once.
Fast Search will only search records whose index happens to be in memory at the time of the search, whereas Search will search the entire database -- which may take some time.
Furthermore, Fast Search will only accept search strings in the Name or Group fields, whereas Search will also accept search criteria in Street 1, City, and Function.
If you hit one of the search buttons with no search criteria specified, you are searching on a null string and will find every record. If you specify more than one search criteria, all must be matched for a record to be shown.
The search strings generate a match if they appear anywhere in a record's field. So searching on 'ce' would find 'Nice' and 'Cecil'. In the Search mode, a search string in Street 1 is compared against Street 1 and Street 2; City is compared against City, State and ZIP; Function is compared against Function and Remark.
Commands after a search (either) is completed.
When Address Manager has found a record, you see the record along with a host of buttons: Find Prior, Find Next, Enter Record, Duplicate, Store, Print Address, Delete, Print and Delete, and Cancel.
The Find Prior and Find Next move you forward or back one record, showing only those that meet your search criteria. You may also use the up and down arrows to find the prior and next records without leaving the keyboard.
Enter Record (control-E) allows you to add a new record to the database.
Duplicate creates a new record in the current database containing the same information as the current record.
Store will save any changes you may have made to the record. You can use the search criteria to find a record, modify the necessary fields, and then store the changes.
Print Record (control-P) prints the currently visible record to the selected output device. The output device is set in the Print To... menu. You can send it to the IIgs printer port, or to a disk as either a text file, an AppleWorks word processor document, or as a WordPerfect word processor document.
Delete (control-D) deletes the current record from the database. The record can be restored with Undo if you do so immediately.
Print and Delete prints the current record, and then deletes it from the database. This is useful if you think you may need the address at some future time, but don't want it in the database at the present time.
Cancel (escape) - when searching, cancel allows you to enter a new search string. If entering records or loading a mail/merge file, cancel will abort.
Getting it all down on paper.
In the File menu are the choices Page Setup and Print. Page Setup allows you to set the top and bottom margins and the number of lines per page, as well as the left margin and number of test labels to print for labels. The values here are saved out to disk, so once you set them to your satisfaction, you don't have to worry about them. You can also set a printer initialization string.
Print will let you print out your database. (Remember, depending on how the Print To... menu is configured, you may be printing to a printer or to a text file on disk!) You get to choose the way the data is formatted: either a full page report or labels, and alphabetized by name, sorted by group and name, sorted by ZIP code, or sorted by name in one specific group. Be aware that if an address has two groups associated with it, it can be printed twice.
The name you give the report also becomes the name in the Defaults menu. If you set the Group names to the groups in your database, then you can set the titles to be a longer description.
Advanced Features.
Sort Index File: Sort index file sorts the current database. When you add a record, it is placed at the beginning of the database. To ensure that your database is in order, the index file must be sorted.
