Australian Open Access User Group Meeting - 9 December 1997

Our annual Christmas Party meant that discussion was more
informal than usual



Show and tell (Q & A)



Linking Spreadsheets



Several spreadsheets cover successive financial years. Can the
data be linked to do totals or graphs? Yes - there are three
ways this can be done in OA Spreadsheet. 

1. You can create an "external channel" - from within the "top"
spreadsheet select XTERNAL from the Spreadsheet Command Menu.
This allows you to create up to four channels to other
spreadsheets. For calculations the channel number is added to
the cell reference (eg A4#1 means cell A4 in the spreadsheet
designated channel 1)

2. You can use the EXTRN( "file", ref ) function where file is
the name of an .FMD spreadsheet which is not open.

3. From the Spreadsheet Menu (ie no Spreadsheet loaded) you can
CONSOLIDATE several spreadsheets of identical structure.



Expression  in Print Mask objects



Lindy Kidman explained how she uses a conditional statement
embedded in a print mask object to concatenate several fields.
For example, a valid expression might be:

TITLE + ' ' + (DUE<1000|FIRSTNAME + ' '|'') + LASTNAME

(only prints firstname if the  amount due is less than 1000!)

Similarly, expression can be included in the sub-totals and
totals sections of a print mask:

SUM(LASTNAME<'M'|1|0)  will count the number of records where
the surname begins with A to L (note the use of 1 and 0 to
perform the counting).



Another way of speeding up the loading of OA under WIN95



Graeme Vines suggests the following:

1. As usual, create a icon for Open Access on the desktop

2. Double click on the icon to launch OA

3. Press Alt-Enter once to open OA in a small screen (almost
instantaneous)

4. Click on the expand control to expand it to full screen.

Graeme found that it take about 5 seconds to load this way.

(this tip also seems to work when loading OA from WIN3.11)



Year 2000 is looming



Michael  Paine ran briefly through some of the problems that
will occur in 2000 - see separate handout or his web page. Note
that in some (hopefully very rare) cases a PC will become
unbootable if its system date is set to the year 2000, due to
BIOS/CMOS problems so don't go changing sysdate (to experiment)
without doing a full backup. Most of us with PCs manufactured up
to about mid-1997 will suffer the annoyance of having to enter a
post-1999 sysdate every time the PC is booted after the turn of
the century/millenium.



Future directions of Information Technology



Terry treated us to a multimedia presentation by a leading
expert in the Information Technology industry - Mr Bob Hayward
from Garnter Group. Network computing (back to "dumb
terminals"), centralised application development, Year 2000
(Y2K) and the very high cost of having a PC sitting on someone's
desk (at least US $12,000 per year) were included in the
wide-ranging lecture.



Disclaimer

Notice: Users should not act solely on the basis of the material
contained in this document. Items contained in this document are
presented as possible solutions to problems but do not
constitute advice. In particular, no assurance can be given that
the possible solutions will work in every situation or that loss
of data will not occur. Always back-up data before trying to
rectify a problem.