Impact features in detailImpact is a general purpose relational database program, providing facilities for the creation, editing, import and export of data, as well as allowing data to be merged directly into Impression or OvationPro documents for mail shots, report generation, label printing, invoicing, etc.
Importantly, Impact also has a scripting language enabling a high degree of user configuration, greatly improving the ease of use and general productivity.
Impact mimics the appearance and use of the familiar card index system, displaying a single record on a user designed card. Each card contains a number of fields from each record, but may also contain the results of calculations based on field values, or familiar desktop features such as option buttons and user-defined, pop-up menus.
Each card has a scrolling tool bar providing buttons to browse through the database records, enter new records or delete old ones, set indexes, filters and field maps (see below), access report and label printing, import and export tools, etc.
There is also a scrollable table display, allowing the entire database, or selections from it, to be viewed or printed. Records may be edited direct from the table display as well as in the card.
There are three main facilities which must be available in any database. It must be possible process records in a given order, and to select a specific set of records and a set of fields for a particular purpose. For example, you may need to print labels or envelopes, in postcode order, for all club members who have not paid their subscriptions. The labels need to contain only the name and address fields from the database.
These three facilities are provided within Impact using indexes, filters and field maps. The user may create as many of each of these as required, which may then be selected from pop-up menus as needed. Once selected, they control all operations on the database, from browsing and viewing records to label printing, exporting, etc.
Each card displays a number of fields which may contain text, numbers, dates, pictures, calculations, tick boxes, pop-up menus & browsers for selecting from a pre-defined set of options, link buttons to external files and applications, and user programmed action buttons.
Several cards may be designed for one database, and the fields repeated on several cards, or spread out between them. Extra cards can be used in cases where the full data is not constantly required, or in order to protect sensitive data with a password.
In a card index box it is normal to store cards sorted in some way for easy reference. In Impact records are stored in whatever order they are entered, with new records re-using the space vacated by any previously deleted record. This is because moving data about on the disc is not only time consuming, but adds to disc wear and tear.
Instead an index is kept, like that found at the back of a book, allowing any required record to be quickly found. This index lists records in ascending or descending order of a specified field or group of fields.
This method allows many different indexes to be kept, allowing the appropriate one to be selected for the current purpose. Each one is given a name by the user, and may be selected from a pop-up menu as required. All Impact indexes are kept up to date automatically when records are entered, modified, or deleted.
Impact allows you to build named indexes, on as many fields as you like, sorting in ascending or descending order. It is even possible to create an index which only contains certain selected records, and this will be found to be useful when exporting data, or producing reports and mail shots.
A filter in Impact, as in real life, is a device which will only let certain things through, holding others back. What passes through is what we want, what remains is discarded, as with say a coffee filter. You may define many different named filters for the same database, and select which one you want to use, so that, for example, only certain people will receive a mail shot, and nobody else.
For complex situations, it is possible to combine two or more filters. For example, we may want the addresses of all club members over 18 who have not yet paid their subscriptions. Filters may be combined in many ways, and saved as compound filters for use on future occasions.
It is often necessary to select the data fields to be used in an operation, so that for example a label may include a name and address but exclude other data. Impact provides the facility to create named field selections, defining both the fields and their order. It is also possible to specify that certain fields are to be concatenated together, for instance to join a title field ('Mr') with a name field ('Smith') to produce 'Mr Smith' as a single item.
As with indexes and filters, these named field selections, or field maps, may be saved for future use.
An important feature of Impact is its support for the Impulse module. This module allows all programs written appropriately to communicate with each other, both requesting and sending data, or sending and receiving commands. Using this system, Impact is capable of sending data to Impression and OvationPro, when asked, and also instructing these programs to merge data and print the results. It is also possible to tell OvationPro to execute a given macro, and return the result to Impact, opening up endless possibilities.
There are situations where people may require access to a database who should not be allowed to see or alter certain sensitive information. To allow for this, it is possible to set password protection on a card. Once this has been done, the card may not be displayed without the user entering the required password.
In addition to the card display which shows the content of one data record at a time, a table display is also provided which shows many records in a scrollable window similar to a spreadsheet.
Clicking in any record in a table causes that record to be shown in the card. The table may also be used to select a group of records for export, label printing, etc. The data can be edited direct in the table display.
A table menu is also available to control record selection and locate and optionally delete duplicate records. The tables can be printed, and individual columns can be resized, moved or hidden.
Each data field may hold one of several different data types, and these are presented using familiar desktop features, such as a selection of radio buttons, pop-up menus, etc.
The most common of these is the text type, used to hold all manner of textual data, such as names and addresses, and these fields may be single or multi-line.
While it is possible to hold any data such as a number or date as text, this method has several disadvantages. Such numbers cannot be used in calculations, they cannot be used to sort records into order (as text, 200 would count as higher than 1000, since 2 follows 1 alphabetically), and large numbers would take up more disc space.
For these reasons special field types are defined for non-text fields such as numbers and dates, and these should be used whenever appropriate.
Special fields are also provided to hold pictures (sprites), flag or on/off indicators, multiple option buttons, user defined pop-up menus, and File field types.
The File field type enables any computer file or directory to be linked to a record. Clicking on such a field is equivalent to double clicking on the file in a filer window: loading a document into a wordprocessor, playing a movie clip or music file, for example.
This is such an important feature that a separate application has been developed to provide it, called LabPrint. However, this is controlled directly from within Impact in a seamless manner.
Labels may be dragged directly to the printer, or save to disc and printed later, perhaps many times. It is also possible to queue labels, singly or on groups, maybe from different databases, and then print them in one go when convenient.
The LabPrint application has a large range of Avery labels pre-defined, and also allows other styles, shapes and sizes to be created and saved.
Impact is also fully equipped to import and export data, to and from other applications or disc files, in the conventional desktop manner. Direct in memory transfer will be used where this is supported by the other application, otherwise transfer will be via a scrap file on disc.
It is likely that you may already have important information stored within another application, such as a spreadsheet or less advanced database, and may wish to import this data directly into an Impact database. This may be done, provided the other application can export its data in CSV or TSV format, which most do.
Impact can import and export data in CSV and TSV format, with provision for handling many variants. It is also possible to export records one field to a line, which is handy for printing a single label, exporting an address directly into a wordprocessor, etc.
Impact also allows any displayed data field to be dragged from the displayed card and dropped into any other application that will accept it, such as Impression, OvationPro, TextEase, TechWriter, Edit, and many others, or into a filer window to create a text file containing the field's textual content.
Data may also be dragged from field to field within Impact, and imported into Impact from another application.
The interpretation of the imported text will depend on the field type the text is imported into. For example, if importing into a date field, Impact will do its best to interpret the text as a date.
Action buttons allow a pre-defined sequence of commands to be executed, to carry out complex operations at the click of a button.
For example, indexes, filters and field maps may be selected, labels or reports printed, field values changed, etc.
An action button can also be represented by a menu icon, where clicking on it will open a menu and the action resulting depends on the user's menu choice.
It is very important with any computer application that a backup copy of stored data should be made at regular intervals to guard against loss of valuable information. Impact will keep a selectable number of past backup copies of each database, and allow you to restore any of these later if necessary.
Backup copies are squashed and stored on a user defined backup path which may be another hard disc, a floppy disc, or network fileserver, etc.