There are any number of programs to help you find a data file. ISYS, the Find File on Word, Windows File Manager, Norton Utilities, X-Tree and so on.
But what about graphics files?
What if you have images created by several different programs, clip art and faxed and scanned images all over the hard disk? How can you find what you want, when you want it?
An Australian company, Softword Publishing Pty Ltd, has come up with ThumbsPlus which goes through the hard disk, grabs a thumb nail of each graphics file and annotates it for size, dates and location.
When you run the program it puts the file list on the left and on the right it puts 30 thumb-nail-size views of each graphic.
Then you can click on the graphic you want and ThumbsPlus will open the application and the file.
Because graphics files are so large, many people archive them on to floppies or have clip art on CDs, so you can be shuffling about for a long time finding the graphic file you want. With thumbnail you can put include these files on the database and when you next run ThumbsPlus it will call for that disk or CD by its Volume name.
There are also some editing functions. (It is $99 from Softword 03 8982086).
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Peter Isaacson has just published the 1994 Information Technology Index. The index covers the Australian industry, including companies, industry groups and events. ($85 Phone 03 2457777). The amazing thing is that it comes out in paper, when everyone in the IT industry knows that the electronic form is so much easier to search through.
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Borland has sold its spreadsheet business Quattro Pro to Novell for $US145 million, the companies announced last week.
Novell recently merged with WordPerfect. With Quattro Pro it will be better able to compete in the office-suite and network market against Microsoft (Word and Excel) and Lotus (Ami-Pro and 1-2-3)
Borland is no longer in that sort of market. Borland is now headed for the large-organisation market with the launch of dBASE 5.0 for Windows. dBASE is for organisations that have a lot of data and want to manipulate, select and publish in their own way.