What this newsletter needs is a little more technical shop talk. Because beyond the hassles of getting data and the thrills of analyzing it, there's the matter of making efficient use of the PC.
In hope of getting a dialogue going, I'll go first. Here, with the emphasis on software, is how we do it at the Post-Dispatch:
Personnel: One guy so far (me).
Software that I rely on:
XDB: a database manager that uses Structured Query Language (SQL), a very powerful and relatively easy to learn language for analyzing and maintaining tables of data. On my PC, XDB gets annoyingly slow working with tables of more than about 50,000 records.
FoxPro: a database manager compatible with the popular dBASE standard. FoxPro is four times faster than XDB at manipulating data, but dBASE language requires actual programming to do anything fancy.
Nine Track Express: this Elliot Jaspin production, buggy in its earlier versions, has become an indispensable tool for getting data off a tape.
PCanywhere: this very handy program gives me full remote control, by modem, of the office PC. With a laptop at home, I can cook dinner while working the bugs out of long complicated queries.
DESQview: for efficient multitasking, this beats Windows 3.0. DESQview allows me to run several full-size DOS applications at once. I can edit an XDB batch file in XyWrite and then, in a single keystroke, jump to XDB to run what I've just written.
Various Utilities: If you don't already use PC Tools, buy it. Its disk cache, to which I grant one megabyte of RAM, can double the effective speed of your hard disk drive without putting your data at the slightest risk.
I use The Norton Utilities to recover files that I or my colleagues have mistakenly erased. I've used its Disk Doctor to diagnose and repair the occasional bad floppy.
PKZIP: a shareware program available on many PC bulletin boards, saves disk space by compressing files you don't use regularly. PKZIP compresses most database tables by 80 to 90 percent; PKUNZIP, a companion to PKZIP, decompresses even large tables for use in less than a minute.
Questions or comments? Call (314) 622-7205 or write to George Landau, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 900 North Tucker Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63105.