By Mary Sheridan, Vice President, Tampa PC Users Group
mcpease@mindspring.com

Mary Sheridan started the Windows SIG at 6:30 PM. Mary is turning over the moderation of the SIG to Kevan Sheridan, our new president. The SIG/Q&A will continue indefinitely.

Kevan Sheridan took over the meeting at 6:45 PM. Kevan welcomed everyone and introduced the officers. He announced that the Access SIG and VBA SIG are still being held at Gateway on Dale Mabry. Check page 10 for dates and times. Kevan brought the Microsoft T-shirts from the Extreme event and they were given to anyone who wanted one. He also had the tickets for the upcoming ITEC event, May 1st and 2nd. You can register for the event on the Internet from a link on the tpcug.org website. Be sure when registering for the event to include the number TX1769 so the TPCUG gets credit for your attending the event. Kevan still needs volunteers to staff the tables for the event at the Convention Center in downtown Tampa.

Bruce Register announced the scheduled presenters for the next couple of months. He has an FBI agent scheduled to discuss Internet crime for our May meeting. In June, Steve Singer of RDI will give a talk on computer hardware. Then Kevan called for a 10 minute break.

After the break, at 7:10 PM Kevan introduced the presenter for the evening, one of our own members, Tom Cone, doing a demonstration of Alpha Five database software. Tom doesn’t actually represent the company, but he uses and likes the product very much. The company has been through many changes in the last few years. A new version of Alpha Five is due out in June. This software lets non-programmers build fairly sophisticated databases. Tom demonstrated the Alpha Five Windows database program Version 4.5. The single version of this software sells for $149.00 retail or $129.00 for the user group. The product is bundled with a zip code database that retails for $29.00. Our members can get the $180.00 value for only $129.00. Multi-user versions are also available that will run via a LAN with 10 - 15 users. This is a relational database, not a “flat” database.

The program is laid out in a very user friendly manner. Drop down menus at the top allow the user to work with tables, reports, forms and all the other features of a relational database. The forms are quite easily customizable; the data can be sorted by typing information into any field in the form and doing a sort. You can do searches and queries of the forms data. The browse feature allows you to see many records at once. You can use browse and run a query of any field in the database. The program has a script recorder. You can write in query operators such as less than, <, and greater than, >. The queries are very flexible and support standard wildcards. After a query is run, the number of records found is shown at the bottom of the screen. All aspects of the program work with the print function.

When you open a form in design mode, a drag and drop menu is available and holds all of the available fields for the data table for the form you are creating, plus a tool box. You can design the fields with imbedded controls. You can build lists with preset data to maintain control of how the data is entered onto the forms. This is done with field rules. Data can also be posted to an external table.

Tom designed a form for the group’s membership and showed us how many of the features of the program are used. It seems to be simple to design a form. From design mode, Tom used genie’s (wizards) to assist in the design. He added a “print labels” button. It is possible to include filters in the label printing. It did a great job of putting barcodes on the labels also.

The program comes with help files in PDF form or Word. Additional help is available on the message board at http://www.Alphafive.com.

Finally, Tom demonstrated a commercial application he created in Alpha Five for Bar Associations (lawyers) to kept track of members and manage meetings.