Suppose you think that you need to start using some Graphics software. How can you tell if you need a drawing program, a CAD system, or a desktop publishing system? The only way to know if these systems are what you need is to try to use one or more of them and learn what they do. Then you will be able to judge whether they do what you want. Still, it is expensive to buy a package you think you need only to find out you need a CAD system rather than a presentation system.

There is a class of software available that will help you out of this dilemma. Shareware is the name for this class of software. There are many talented people who have created excellent software but do not have the budget to market it with heavy advertising and so forth. What these people do instead is to distribute the software at little or no charge. The creator of a shareware program encourages you to try his package for free. If you like it enough that you want to continue using it, he asks you to "register" your interest by sending him money. The fee varies, but mostly ranges from about $10 to $100, with the majority in the $25 to $55 range. Usually you will receive some extra benefit when you register. Typical examples are the latest release of the software, a printed and bound manual, technical support, and software modules containing features not found in the Shareware version. Whether or not you like the software enough to register it and continue using it, they encourage you to share it with others, hence the name.

Shareware allows you to try different kinds of systems with very little investment. If you like them, you register and pay for them then. I discuss this topic at greater length under the chapter on Operations. For your purposes they will also allow you to find out whether the type of package fits the need you have.

In each software category you should pick one brand. For example, your office should use only one word processing program. It is more important to have one package in each category than to suffer minor efficiency losses as new employees learn the standard package. There are two main reasons: the first is ease of transfer of information among users. If computers don't make it easier to maintain, access, and share information then we might as well not have them. The second reason is efficiency. If your staff has to maintain two word processors you will only be able to do half as good a job on each. You will know less about all the extra features not often used but capable of saving mounds of time when needed.

Many employees will come to your firm already knowing some other packages than the ones you use. Therefore, this is an area where you need that top management support. You need to be able to say something like: "The president just won't let us get two different packages for word processing." At any time one or another package may have some useful feature that your chosen package lacks. The newly arriving people may have a valid point just at that moment. Persevere. If your package is one of the industry leaders it will catch up sooner or later. In any case, remember the 90/10 rule: 90% of the work in any office uses only 10% of the features in any package.

Many programs now have a "Professional" Version and a regular version. Mixing the two should not cause you problems. The more advanced packages should not be able to create files that the less powerful version can't handle. The two versions should also operate identically except for the lack of some advanced features in the standard version.

Consider carefully before using anything but a package from one of the main software firms for your major PC software categories. Remember the 90/10 rule I just mentioned. The vast bulk of the work done will use only a small amount of the features of the package. Using a mainstream vendor's package will show many benefits: More third parties will create add-on packages and utilities. The vendor will have more resources to research problems if you need support. There will be more outside reference material available. You will be more likely to be able to exchange files with customers, service firms, suppliers, and other outside agencies. When you need to hire temporary help, it will be easier to find people skilled with your package. When you hire new staff they will be more likely to be familiar with your package.

The biggest cost of conversion is usually the time lost while you retrain the users. Do not underestimate this cost. If you add it up you will see that the cumulative effect far outweighs the cost of the software. With 10 to 100 users of a package, the new package had better be quite a bit more productive or you're never going to make up the lost time. About the only times you should consider changing packages are when the vendor goes out of business, you switch to a new environment where the present package does not run, for example, when installing a LAN, or your office merges with another that uses a different package.

In the case where two organizations merge, be sure that you make the better choice, not the easier choice. Suppose that a larger firm buys out your smaller firm. You have been using a mainstream package like Quatro Pro, but the larger firm has been using Fred's Friendly Spreadsheet that they started using back in the days of the CPM operating system. Fred's might be cheaper. Go with Quatro Pro.

Caution your users not to overcorrect internal memos. Since word processors have become common, they tempt one to go back and fix every little detail. Large companies who have spent much money studying this matter have concluded that it is a colossal waste of time. Some have even introduced a policy against correcting and reprinting internal memo's unless they contain materially significant errors.

Since everyone knows that you have access to a word processor, you will not be impressing anyone. Run the spelling checker, print the memo, then proofread the draft and send the marked up copy without reprinting. If it's for the board of directors, maybe you should go a little further. Otherwise, save the time and money.

Spell check anything that is going outside your office. Spelling errors take away credibility and make a bad image. This is a very fast operation, so it is well worth doing. Using a spelling checker also can improve your spelling if you will work with it. Make a list of the words that the spelling checker shows you got wrong. You can use a notepad editor for this task or you can just open a separate window in your word processor. In spite of what you might think, this list will not be very long. Trust me on this. People do not write with very many different words. You might be able to read over 50 thousand different words, but you probably write with less. All Shakespeare's works contain fewer than 10 thousand unique words. If you make such an error list and study it from time to time, you will become an excellent speller for the words you actually use.

Remember, however, that spelling checkers are not proofreaders. Some typo's make perfectly valid words that either result in garbled sentences, or worse, change the meaning. Sometimes these typo's result in errors that are humorous, obscene, or downright erroneous. "Please kick me" is not the same as "Please kiss me." You must still read your output carefully for content, preferably several days after you write it. If you cannot wait this long, ask someone else to proof it. You will have a difficult time proofreading material that is fresh in your mind because you will "see" what you remember rather than what is on the page. For important material you should print the document and proofread it from the paper copy. For some reason it is much more difficult to do a good job proofreading on the screen.

Most poor writers have no idea of their lack of skill or of how bad it makes the office look. Using a grammar checker program will help you catch errors in material that you are producing. It also will help you improve your grammar because when it points out the mistakes you make you will come to remember them with time.

If you decide not to use the grammar checker, please study the Rules of Grammar in Appendix C. It is rather tongue in cheek, and the humor might help you remember some sticky point.

Caution your users that grammar checkers are not proof readers either. Perfectly good grammar can be nonsense: "The house ran down the hill." Grammatically correct sentences also can say things you do not mean to say.

If your firm has a silly twit on the staff and you let him fool around with a powerful desktop publishing program, he will become a "power twit." With these powerful tools he can quickly produce mounds of utter garbage that will make your firm look like a ship of fools. Once upon a time some unfettered soul from a large, well known computer firm with a serious image and three letters in its name sent me a document that was touting the utility of their systems for desktop publishing. The errors it contained were remarkable in their number and variety. It impressed me all right, but not in a favorable way. For documents that are to be sent outside the company be sure that you have someone who has good writing skills proofread the material before printing it in final form.

These are some simple guidelines for the use of word processing tools that will make your material look more professional. They mainly help steer you around some of the pitfalls:

Do not use right justification. It is harder to read material that is right justified than that with a ragged right margin. It looks impressive when well done, but it is very error prone. Unless you are a professional proofreader, you will find that mistakes are easy to miss (for everyone but your readers.)

Don't use more than two typefaces in one document unless you are creating posters for a circus. Even in display advertising you should stick to only a few typefaces. Exotic typefaces are great for special events or where your company has a market closely identified with a special theme. Otherwise they are generally difficult to read. Your firm should select a few good typefaces and use them for all documents so that a standard corporate image emerges. (O.K., the announcement of the company picnic can be different.)

Don't use more than four variations on font size, italics, etc. on one page. The same thing applies for type styles. The document will look much more professional if you keep it clean and simple. Use underlining and boldface sparingly, no more than a few words per page. This is an example where "less [really] is more."

When you first start to use a new word processing package it helps to turn on any options that display the internal codes stored in the document. This display will help you understand the exact effects of each function key. It also will help you see why a paragraph did not re-edit like you thought it would. Sometimes turning on this display will remove the WYSIWYG screen formatting that the word processing vendor is so proud of. Usually you are not going to know what the page is going to look like until you print it anyway, so don't worry about the WYSIWYG. You can always turn off the code display if you need to. In addition, there usually is an option to display the page in full size exactly as it will print (Print Preview).

Beware of using the wrong tool. These days many people are dabblers at Lotus 123 or Excel. They get a new task to do, so they set up a spread sheet. As the firm grows they find that they end up with 2,000 rows in the sheet. Next they start breaking up the worksheet into regions or some other division, just so they can get all the detail data in. A spreadsheet system is the wrong tool for this type of job. You should rewrite these applications using a data base. You can drive a screw with a hammer, but you get better results for the company if you use a screwdriver. For further information, see the later section on Data Base software.

You probably already know that data base systems are one of the major applications for most PC's. Unfortunately, "data base" is one of those terms that has been so universally used that it has lost any very specific meaning. Since it is the best term to describe one of the major uses of PC systems, I would like to give a more precise definition for our use: Data base systems allow the storage and retrieval of textual data that is well structured, (not necessarily financial) and can grow to an arbitrarily large file size.

The first restriction, "textual data," is to limit data bases to data that is text rather than graphics. Of course, graphics oriented filing systems exist that have many of the attributes of data base systems. The sellers of these systems therefore often use terms such as graphics data base to describe these filing systems. If you will be doing a lot of work with graphics you may even need one, but we are not talking about such systems.

The second restriction, "well structured," is to set data base systems apart from word processing systems where the contents of any particular piece of data are free form. Granted, there is "formatting" information stored with the word processing text, but each paragraph has independent format. In data base systems the data are in "records" or "rows," and each record or row has the same structure as all the others.

The third restriction, "grow arbitrarily," is to separate data base systems from spreadsheets. The ideal spreadsheet has a fixed number of rows and columns. For example, the columns might represent the months of a year plus an annual total. The rows might represent the states of the nation with extra rows to summarize regional and national totals. If the rows were to represent individual salesmen, then as the firm grew, the number of rows would grow. Since there is no theoretical limit to the number of rows, this is probably not a good spreadsheet application.

Naturally, such worksheets exist. More people know how to create spreadsheets than know how to create data bases. For one thing, data bases are generally harder to use than spreadsheets. Such misuse of spreadsheet tools as creating worksheets that are open-ended in one or both dimensions does not invalidate this point. Data base systems are for applications where the number of records can grow arbitrarily large. Spreadsheets are for applications where the number of rows and columns is static but the contents of the cells may change often.

So, what data base system should you use? As I mentioned earlier, and in spite of what most advertising would lead you to believe, there is no clear leader in this marketplace. There are some features that divide this huge marketplace into some smaller pieces so that you can more easily find the right tool for your firm.

The first distinction is that the simpler tools are more properly called file managers. They generally support only files known as "flat files." The key points about flat files are that each file stands by itself and every record in the file looks exactly alike. There may be other files that contain indexes into the main file. The phrase "stands by itself" means that no other file connects to the main file by the data content. There is at least one field in the file structure that is the "key" field and the file is either stored such that the order of the records is such that this key field is in sequence or a separate index is kept that allows the records in the file to be read out in this sequence.

A second class of data bases is probably best described as "relational" You should be aware that many vendors view this term almost as sacred. You should be wary of using it in their presence. They will then try to trap you with their own special meanings that they will use to make some sales point or another. At its basic level, what the term means is that several files can be stored that share some common key value. For example, we might define an employee master file that has a key field of an employee number. There also might be a payroll detail file that is also indexed by employee number. In the first file there is probably only one record for each employee. In the second file there may be many records for each employee. The employee number is the key to finding all the records in both files that pertain to a particular employee. The employee number is said to relate the two files to each other.

While there is no truly dominant player in the data base market, the best known system is probably dBase . Because of its strong position, you can readily find dBase programmers at reasonable rates, something that cannot be said for any other data base system. Microsoft Access is obviously a strong contender as well. Another is Boreland Paradox.

About the best advice that I can offer on data base software is the following guidelines:

As with any other type package, try to limit your choice of data base systems. If possible, stick with one package. Fortunately, data base packages often offer very strong features in their ability to import and export data files with other data base system structures. If you must get two or, (shudder), even several, you should be able to exchange data between (or among) them without too much difficulty. Unfortunately, this is an error prone procedure, and one that is easy to forget to do. Thus your customer file may not stay in sync with your order file.

Do not pay much attention to the claims of any data base system vendor. Eventually some package may come to dominate the market like Excel does the spreadsheet market. Until it does, take all such claims of superiority with a large grain of salt.

One of the hottest areas of PC networking is the area of Electronic Mail. This may be one of the most significant facilities you ever implement on your PC's. Such systems allow any user to send messages to any other user through the computer system. Generally one does this through a LAN. These systems ultimately become very sophisticated. They allow users to send messages to people who are not on the local system. Some systems will notify the sender when the receiver reads the message. Most will allow sending a message to predefined mailing lists.

How many times have you tried to call someone else just to give him a simple message only to find that person is "away from his desk" or "out of the office" and found yourself involved in a game of telephone tag. This process is an obvious waste of time, and therefore money. What is worse, delaying contact of the other person often means that when you finally make contact, you have lost the inspiration - you can't remember why it looked like such a good idea yesterday. It probably is no better or worse an idea, but some of the associations to other events are beyond recall because the idea is no longer fresh. Voice mail can help here, but some people just don't like to deal with such systems.

There is another facet to this function that is just now emerging. This facet may be the most significant of all. It appears as though much of the function of middle management is to facilitate communication between top management and the rank-and-file. If so, the implementation of an EMail system and the integration of that system in a corporate culture tends to minimize or even to eliminate one or more layers of management in most firms. This organizational streamlining will certainly make companies work better. Anybody in a firm can send an EMail message to the president. It is much less intimidating to the average user since there is not face-to-face confrontation. Thus the president can no longer complain that the staff never tells him what is going on. Information flow will become automatic almost instantly.

There are obvious direct cost savings from eliminating a layer of management personnel. After all, these people are normally experienced, senior people and draw high salaries. Probably more important, eliminating this layer of management is possible because of vastly improved communication in the firm. This streamlined communication also means that the firm will be more responsive, more focused, and more efficient. This increased productivity of the firm as a whole is exactly what you need in today's marketplace. This improved response to the environment is why EMail may be one of the most important tools you ever install on your PC network. But, . . .

EMail will not work unless everyone in the firm has access to the system on a regular basis and actively uses it. If you can notify five users of a meeting via EMail, but have to send a hard-copy to two others, you probably will send hard copy to all users because you will just make seven copies and do it all one way. If top management does not commit to the project they doom it to fail. Everyone, including the CEO, president, etc. must participate at least daily.

Sometimes EMail is combined with other functions into a type of package known as Workgroup Productivity tools. As the name implies, these tools help groups work together to accomplish group goals. These other tools include a wide variety of options, but typical systems include the following functions:

Which browser should you use? $$$$$

There are at least four major categories of PC graphics packages: Engineering Drafting - (AutoCAD, ), Presentation Graphics - (PowerPoint), Pixel Drawing - (PC Paintbrush), and Advanced Drawing - (Correll Draw,). These vary wildly in intent, speed, and difficulty of use. In order to select a graphics package you must first be familiar with what you are trying to do. Next you should have an understanding of the differences in these packages.

Graphics packages vary more widely than word processing packages do, because pictures vary so much more than words do. In order to decide which package you need you must understand very well what it is you want to do. You must then spend several hours with each program that you want to use. It will take this long before you will have a good feel for why this package is different from the others. I listed these not because I recommend them, but because they represent four vastly different classes of drawing package. You should investigate at least these four groups so that you will know what the major differences are. You will then know how to find the best package for your application.

BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It starts out basic, (pun intended), but it can grow with you as far as you want to go. Some people will say that BASIC is "not suitable" for some particular kind of problem. I know of a commercially successful spelling checker written in COBOL. This is a combination of tool and application that knowledgeable people would say is ridiculous. So don't let anybody tell you that BASIC is not the language to start with.

Don't be misled by C-nobs - the world does not revolve around C. Anything that can be done in C can be done in BASIC. If you are turning pro, maybe you should look at C, but only because vendors are writing so much system software in C, not because it is intrinsically better than BASIC.

Visual BASIC is an Integrated Development Environment. The compiler and editor are in a single program. As you change a line it is compiled into an executable form. When you are ready to test you begin execution. As with interpreters, the program can be interrupted, and data or program changes made while testing. The process is not perfect. Some errors are not detectable in the edit phase. A limited number of changes can be made without restarting the run. Etc. If you have ever tried to program before and were frustrated with the limitations and you haven't tried one of these new "incremental compilers" with its integrated editing environment, you should try them now.

Second, the hard work of creating windows, buttons and other visual tools for the application is all done for you. You are shown a menu of tools and to place one in your program you merely drag it to the window you are designing with the mouse. You then fill in some parameters, write a few lines of code to link the tools you designed to the data you are using and write the application much as you would have otherwise. Fi you have never programmed this way you really should try it.

There are some new things under the sun.

The latest new language is Java. It was developed for a single reason - to allow the development of programs that will run on multiple systems under multiple operating systems without being rewritten or even recompiled. Java is also a very powerful tool for developing libraries of reusable code. It has the potential of being very significant in the future. At the very least you should try to become aware of this language and think about where it could be applied in your firm.

(When this section was originally written this was not an obvious problem for many people. We are now near enough to the end of the millennium that this problem now is known as the Y2K bug. The advice still applies.)

Many systems developed in the past have stored the year in a two digit field. In the past this has worked well, but in the year 2000, this will cause all date comparisons to fail since [20]00 is less than [19]99. Now is not too soon to begin assuring that all new programs developed incorporate a full four digit year. A system lifetime of ten years is not unusual. The cost of storage is now so low that saving space is no longer a good reason for not storing the full four digits.

Don't worry about wasted time. If people are so unmotivated that they will spend time playing games when they should be working then you have other problems that are bigger than this one. They will find other ways to waste time if there are no computer games. You probably should not make it a policy to allow game playing on company time, but it will not hurt if a little goes on.

The point of having games is to make the system seem more friendly. This is especially important to new users and to older people who have a problem accepting new technologies. Besides displaying the computer as a friendly device, it also serves to introduce people to several different types of man-machine interfaces. The more different programs a person uses, the more comfortable they are going to feel with new programs that they need to use for serious purposes. One problem with many business uses of PC's is that many users normally use only one program. Learning about such things as the variety of possible interfaces is much easier in the informal context of a game.

This material is mostly left over from an earlier work on this book. You might not have any older DOS systems to support, but it seemed a shame to throw this away. You an just ignore it.

Have a Menu System For Most Users.

Menu systems are programs that allow a system manager to set up a list of common functions for each user. When the system boots it automatically displays these options in a list, or Menu, for the user to choose from. The user does not have to know any DOS commands at all. When each program exits it automatically returns to the Menu system.

For first time users this technique will serve to hide the unpleasant realities of DOS commands. Once the user feels at home using some of the tools he uses every day he can worry about DOS. Even for more experienced users the Menu will be a real time saver, since it also minimizes the likelihood of keying errors.

Menu systems often contain other desirable system features. For example, they more often than not have a screen saver feature. They are often a part of a more comprehensive DOS shell. On a LAN they also may serve the function of a license metering system. I discuss these ideas further in other sections of this book. Good commercial packages include PC Tools and Norton Commander. DOS 4.0 and later have built-in menu systems and shells. They may be fine for you.

DOS shells are programs that give the user the same power for most DOS commands that a Menu does for running applications. They usually have a display of one or more of the directories from the disk drives. They allow you to select the files in some way and then select from a menu of DOS commands to execute on the selected files. Often they allow file operations DOS itself does not directly support. These may include viewing with backward scrolling, full screen editing, and moving files (rather than copying and then deleting.)

You probably should select your word processing, spreadsheet, and other major application tools before you select a DOS shell. Then select one that operates in the most compatible manner with these tools. I like Norton Commander and PC Tools. If you think you will be using a DOS shell a lot of the time you might prefer Norton Commander. I find it to be more intuitive; when I was first learning to use it, it nearly always did what I expected it to do. PC Tools is more powerful, as many of the features it contains sell as separate packages with Norton Utilities. DOS version 4.0 and later contain a shell. I never used them much because I already had Norton Commander. They are probably adequate and they come "free" with DOS.

The DOS that comes with the IBM PC is PC-DOS. Microsoft created this system and licensed it to IBM. They also sell it as MS-DOS. They also license this package to other vendors as well. Generally speaking, you can install PC-DOS or MS-DOS on any compatible PC and it will work. If a vendor creates hardware that is slightly nonstandard, they will modify MS-DOS. These modified machines can generally boot and run under either PC-DOS or unmodified MS-DOS. There may be some functions that will not work without their special version of MS-DOS. MS-DOS generally comes with several other utilities that PC-DOS does not come with. This is also true of vendor modified MS-DOS, but the added utilities may be different from Microsoft's.

Digital Research has now brought out an operating system for the PC family that they call DR-DOS. They claim it is compatible with MS-DOS and PC-DOS. If you have a wide variety of hardware to support, this might be your best alternative for finding one DOS that will support them all. Try it before you commit! Since vendors have extended the PC family in so many directions it would be impossible to create a single version that will work in all of them. Many of the modifications are mutually exclusive. I have had good luck with it on a wide range of clones. I know of some users who reported problems in LAN environments.

Most software will require at least version 2.0 of DOS to run. Unfortunately, each release of DOS has gotten bigger and bigger. Since lack of sufficient RAM limits the utility of PC's so much, you would generally want to run the earliest release of DOS that you can.

DOS release 4.0 included a new shell facility. It also offered support of disk drives larger than 30 MBytes. There are many other ways to support larger disks, however, and many other shell programs. One of the major drawbacks to release 4 is that Microsoft apparently rewrote most of the utilities in a higher level language. While this may make the job of Microsoft easier, and the utilities themselves may be improved, they now occupy almost 1.5 MBytes of disk space. Indeed, the three files required to make a disk bootable take almost 100 K.

DOS Release 5.0 has gone a long way toward solving the RAM Cram problem for users of AT machines and larger. By taking advantage of extended RAM it can load all of DOS and many extra drivers into other addresses, leaving close to 600K for user programs. It also will allow you to run programs that required specific earlier releases of DOS. Unfortunately, it will not solve the RAM problem for users of XT class machines. If you have XT's, you would not gain by using 5.0, and might lose because of the kinds of problems discussed under 4.0.

A disk cache program does two things. One is to use a chunk of memory to hold data that is to be written to disk. It allows programs to continue running while it writes the data out to the disk in the background. It also reads extra data from the disk when asked for a single sector, and holds the data ready for use by the program. This simple, proven technique can vastly improve the apparent performance of slower disk drives. You can safely assume that most applications will be improved by two to four times when they are accessing the disk. This technique does not improve the performance of all programs since some do not make much use of the disk.

Disk cache programs can use either extended memory, expanded memory, or regular memory. Even if you dedicate as few as 64K bytes to a disk cache, it will speed up most operations. PC Tools has a good disk cache function. A good program comes with Windows. (The 3.1 version is much better than the 3.0 version.) There are other good ones as well.

An alternative to a disk cache is a RAM disk. This utility is a program that sets aside a block of RAM and fools DOS into thinking that it is a disk drive. This "disk" will run very fast since it has zero seek time and zero rotational latency. It can speed up many types of processing such as program compiling. But, losing power or forgetting to copy the data to a hard disk before shutting off power will mean losing the data. Disk caches will speed up most operations almost as much as a RAM disk, and are much less error prone than a RAM disk.

Microsoft should be ashamed that this program even exists. There is no excuse for using it. I flaunt the fact that I do not know how to use it. I refuse to learn how. Nobody should have to use such tools. Buy a simple screen editor, or try FRED; it's a public domain program. If you use a DOS shell such as Norton Commander, PC Tools, etc., they usually contain a simple line editor. Even if you feel that your knowledge of this program shows off your skills as a power user, please spare your poor users. If you are using DOS 5.0 or later it comes with a good full screen editor called EDIT.