Night Owl 6/Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso/008a/checks51.zip/CB-NOTES.TXT

Text File | 1992-02-08 | 13KB | 284 lines

                   THE TALKING CHECKBOOK - VERSION 5.01

                  By Charles Crawford and Donald Barrett

Special thanks to Marshall Dudley for letting us use his "Send.exe"
program to run these notes. Also to Eric Bohlman for his kindness in
helping Charlie Crawford understand a really difficult Clipper routine for
input error trapping, and to Donna Veno and Scott Marshall for their work
on testing the programs.

    While no formal documentation has been developed for the Talking
Checkbook, here's some information that should help. The program has been
written to be user friendly and should not be a problem to run without
extensive documentation.

    1: What you need.

    If you have an I.B.M. or clone that works with DOS, and a printer and
hopefully some money after you've bought all that stuff, then you are all
set. A speech synthesizer is necessary for folks who do not see the
screen, as the "Talking" Checkbook was written to work with speech
synthesis. If you can see the screen, then your in good shape with our
color selection menu option.

    2: Getting started.

    Just make a sub-directory on your hard disk or unzip the Talking
Checkbook to a floppy and go there. Type "Checks" (without the quotes) and
you are on your way.

    3: Menu options.

    The "Talking Checkbook" is completely menu driven. After a couple of
questions and set up automatic functions, you'll be at the main menu. The
set up questions are there to help you decide if you want to see your
balance and leave or to have your balance reported each time you bring up
the main menu. It's nice to have the balance every time you get to the
main menu, but it can get tiring fast. Once you are in the main menu, we
think you'll agree that the thing is pretty easy to understand and move
around, but here's some hints.

    Option 1 is the heart of the program. What good is a checkbook that
talks, but has nothing in it? Well, here's the menu option that lets you
enter checks, withdrawals, credit card charges, deposits or fixed bills,
etc. The most important thing here is to get your checkbook started with a
deposit that will be your initial balance. That starting figure will
become the figure against which all calculations are basically made.
Figure out what you will start the checkbook with and go ahead and enter
number one at the main menu and then pick the deposit option and put it in
there. As you enter checks, deposits, credit card charges (if you like)
and the other options under the main menu option one, you'll see how some
of the nifty questions asked save time and make your life easy.

Use the Personal Comments field for each record wisely.  You have 75
characters to write down exactly the type of transaction you are entering.
This can be invaluable for tax or other purposes at the end of the year.
Whether or not you enter the information in this field in upper or lower
case, it will be stored in upper case.  This is so that records can easily
be found using this field even if you forget the case of your original
entry.

We can't stop bankruptcy; but short of that, we try!

    Option 2 at the main menu lets you edit records that you may have made
mistakes in entering. No problem for the Talking Checkbook to keep your
records up to snuff.

    Option 3 gives you your balance and also lets you reconcile against
bank statements. Once you've used the other menu option of verifying
checks, then the balance should agree with your bank or maybe your bank
has gotten into the S&L thing and the Talking Checkbook is trying to tell
you something.

    Option 4 is great! It allows you to print out lists of your checks and
so forth. Now if you are told that your check was never received, then you
can print out a statement including that check you wrote. You can choose
not to print out the listings in hard copy, but rather to create an ascii
file of them. No problem for the Talking Checkbook. Say, don't we think of
everything; probably not, but we work at it.

    Option 5 gives you the opportunity to check out your fixed bills. This
option helps folks who have a number of bills that have to be paid in the
same amount on a fixed basis.

    Option 6 lets you verify your records against the bank statements. It
helps you know where everyone agrees and hopefully there will not be times
when they don't.

    Option 7 brings up these notes. Many thanks to Marshall Dudley who
wrote the Doorway.exe programs for letting us use the "send.exe" command
program that allows us to write this long-winded rambling commentary and
send it to you from within the program. If you like the way the program is
sent to the screen, you can use the "Send.exe" program to do it with any
ascii file. Simply type "Send" a space and the name of the ascii file on
the command line and there it is. Thanks, Marshall for the great Doorway
program and this little utility that does a lot for us.

    Option 8 gets you more information on the records in the database.
It's fun and check it out. Version 5 of the Talking Checkbook now allows
you to sum and display your credit card charges either as a whole or by
credit card. Nifty, huh.

    Option 9 makes writing checks fun again. Just go ahead and print out
the checks and life is eezee! Well, you'll need to use option 11 first,
since computers are really stupid and have no idea where to send the info
to the check itself.

    Option 10 contains a number of utilities we have written to get
displays of information and other pieces to a checkbook management program
together. Check out the many utilities here. My favorite is the calculator
and the ability to archival your checks into smaller database of chunks of
time. If you take your checkbook over a period of three years, then it's a
lot of stuff for the program to review each time it has to do that, so
just archival your database into smaller yearly ones and your checkbook
will run faster. You can always use the same program to bring back all the
records into a massive database if you like.

    Option 11 tells the computer where to write information on your
checks. Not all checks were created equal and so the Talking Checkbook
must get your help in setting up the printer settings. Fortunately you
will only have to do this once if you use the same checks and printer.

    Option 12 lets folks with low vision or any vision to set screen
colors that are most comfortable.

    Option 13 is for those of you who have not updated your Talking
Checkbook since the first versions. I can understand that since I loved
the "Doggy Dollars" field, but if you ever decide to update your database,
then here's the program to let you do it.

    Option 14 is brand new. It's a security packing program that either
saves current information in memory to your database each time you enter
the option or saves the information every time you enter the main menu. I
recommend that folks use the auto pack function here. If you keep archival
data of your checkbook through the archival option within the utilities at
main menu option 10, then this auto packing will be quick and afford you
max protection. Say, does that sound like an advertisement or what!

    4: What programs should be in with the Talking Checkbook.

    Well, the older versions needed all kinds of stuff, but now here's
what should be in your sub-directory and the rest you can forget:

    1. Checks.exe - the main program that operates the checkbook.

    2. Checkboo.dbf and bills.dbf which are databases that you should have
with older versions or will be installed by this one. Just keep any files
with the extension ".dbf" for your new version unless you already have
them from older versions. The Talking Checkbook will look for the proper
databases and if found, then you move right along, but if not, then the
Talking Checkbook will convert the failsafe database files that came with
it.

    3. CB-notes.txt is this file and should remain in the sub-directory
with the Talking Checkbook. It is accessed by menu option 7.

    4. Send.exe is also necessary. It sends the notes to the user to the
screen.

    5. You might want to keep the other files in the sub-directory as well
since they can help. The one about Clipper is real necessary if the
checkbook does not run. It deals with a memory environment statement that
might be necessary, but I've only seen 2 cases of all users where that has
been true.

    5: Other important stuff.

    Don Barrett and I wrote this program to be useful to us as users of
speech synthesis. We release it to the public domain since it is a great
program in our humble and prejudiced opinions. That does not mean that
anyone or anything is responsible for the results of it's use except for
you if you use it. We have had no problems with it, but can't be
responsible if you or anyone else does.

    If you'd like to call me, Charlie Crawford about the program then
please do so at area 617-727-5550 ext: 4503, or call the Massachusetts
Commission for the Blind Bulletin Board at area 617-451-5327. The BBS uses
8,n,1 and support up to 9600 BPS using a .32 standard or Hayes modem.
slower modems work fine down to 1200 BPS.

    Well, if you think that was long, then play around with the many
options in the checkbook and see if we could have written a book about
them. Feel free to upload the programs (as long as you don't change
anything) to Bulletin Boards or send them to your friends. If you want to
add your own information to the zip file to share with others, then fine.
You might even write better docs than these. If you do write user
information, then please send us the ascii file as well. You can write to:

Charles Crawford
The Massachusetts Commission for the Blind
88 Kingston Street
Boston, MA 02111.

                          QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.

    1. Can I crash the Talking Checkbook

A: Yeah, if you like. Does not seem like the most productive use of time,
but if you input a character rather than a number or character or don't
use slashes when the program is looking for a date, then the program will
not know what to do and exit to DOS. We will work on error trapping for
these problems, but if you do it, then you'll have to re-enter the program
and do what you were doing all over again. In the four years that I have
used this program, I have not had that problem and suspect that you only
would if you choose to crash it. In other words, don't worry if you
seriously want to run the program since it will work fine with proper data
entry.

    2. Do I have to pay for it.

A: No, it is free of charge and released to the public domain without any
liability to the authors, their families, dogs, cats and any other living
thing or entity within the Universe.

    Good luck and enjoy your use of the Talking Checkbook in good health.


                       Talking Checkbook 5.1 update:

    Well, wouldn't you know it! Don Barret could not resist developing a
print to printer or file utility that would provide information for tax
purposes based upon your personal comments lines. OK Don, I think you
really put something nice in here that will help folks out if they arrange
their personal comments by categories that will relate to tax preparation
time.

    The tax print utility is in the utilities menu option #10. Check it
out.

    Also please note that your version 5.1 also allows you to have the
database packed automatically to be secure against power failures or one
of your pets walking across the keyboard. this security option is
activated from menu option #14.

    Lastly, please note the personal comments lines are now converted
automatically to upper case letter when the program exits. This is to
reduce the chances of poor reporting of expenses or income when you sum by
that variable. Also, we've tried to place more screen clearing routines
for folks who were tired of straining their necks trying to read the lines
that kept showing up at the bottom of the screen. these lines are
important since they ask for input and users with vision had a hard time
seeing the area for input. We can't say that all areas are totally fixed
for visual access, but we think we got most if not all of them. Let us
know if you have a problem.

    Enjoy and look forward to version 5.2 when I might even try to do some
automatic budgeting information generation! If you have suggestions for
program improvement, then please try to let us know and make you and
everybody else happy!