Greetings
I am new to this forum. I have been maintaining a few large databases in Alpha 4 since that program came out, but now I want to transfer the .DBF's over to a Windows based DBMS, and would rather like to continue using Alpha Software (partly because it uses DBF as the native data format, and partly because its form and report interface looks pretty straight forward).
My question is actually "pre-sales" since I don't want to buy Alpha 5 until I know the answer. I hope some of the more experienced folks on this forum can provide that answer.
Specifically, Alpha 4 had a built-in feature during data entry, where if you selected a field and pressed the F4 hotkey, the data that was most recently entered into that same field in previous records would be pasted in...no need to re-type the repetitious data. This is important to me since my databases include long fields that contain difficult-to-type strings of characters, and many records that are entered at the same sitting tend to have the same data in certain fields. This "field copy/memory" feature is a real time saver and avoids a lot of typographic errors during data entry.
Does Alpha 5 already have such a feature that can be simply used without additional programming? If not, is it something that can be easily implemented, perhaps with a simple script, by a non-programmer (me!).
I do this work as a vonunteer for a small charitable organization, and don't have a lot of extra time to give to study database programming, and we don't have the funds to hire a programmer to configure the software. Alpha Software tech support was said they will not answer this question or assist me in implementing this feature should I need to do it myself.
Please advise if you have knowledge on this issue...thanks!
I am new to this forum. I have been maintaining a few large databases in Alpha 4 since that program came out, but now I want to transfer the .DBF's over to a Windows based DBMS, and would rather like to continue using Alpha Software (partly because it uses DBF as the native data format, and partly because its form and report interface looks pretty straight forward).
My question is actually "pre-sales" since I don't want to buy Alpha 5 until I know the answer. I hope some of the more experienced folks on this forum can provide that answer.
Specifically, Alpha 4 had a built-in feature during data entry, where if you selected a field and pressed the F4 hotkey, the data that was most recently entered into that same field in previous records would be pasted in...no need to re-type the repetitious data. This is important to me since my databases include long fields that contain difficult-to-type strings of characters, and many records that are entered at the same sitting tend to have the same data in certain fields. This "field copy/memory" feature is a real time saver and avoids a lot of typographic errors during data entry.
Does Alpha 5 already have such a feature that can be simply used without additional programming? If not, is it something that can be easily implemented, perhaps with a simple script, by a non-programmer (me!).
I do this work as a vonunteer for a small charitable organization, and don't have a lot of extra time to give to study database programming, and we don't have the funds to hire a programmer to configure the software. Alpha Software tech support was said they will not answer this question or assist me in implementing this feature should I need to do it myself.
Please advise if you have knowledge on this issue...thanks!
Comment