Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: CDBF Database Viewer and Editor
Don Bradbury tries an inexpensive GUI for accessing venerable databases without programming skills
| Product | CDBF v3.2 by WhiteTown Software |
|---|---|
| Company | Internet Security Systems |
| Web | www.ttp.co.uk |
| Price | £22.95 + VAT |
| We like | Easy to use |
| We don't like | No manual |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Devotees of venerable databases such as dBASE III, III+ and IV, FoxPro and Visual FoxPro, and variants such as dBASE Level 7 - of which there are many - may feel the need for easier access, and a degree of interrogative manipulation that is beyond their programming skills. The shareware program CDBF offers a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to these and lets you, for example, view, edit, repair, print, and export their contents in TXT, Clipper, FoxPro, HTML, PRG, XLS, SQL, DBF, and XML formats.
An integral designer is provided to give professional-looking reports based on the information the database contains, incorporating just the required data and in the format of your choice. The program operates via a series of commands and tools, plus plug-ins that you can create for yourself.
Running under all 32-bit versions of Windows (95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP), as well as DOS and Linux, the program may either be downloaded or supplied on CD by The Thompson Partnership. A personal registration code is then supplied that contains a System Registry key, to be installed before the program will run - a simple enough process.
Installation presents options for language support. Although UK English is not one of them, US English is, importing dates in the US format. Then one of the View/Options lets you adjust the date field format to whatever you need; day-month-year, month-day-year, or year-month-day.
CDBF allows viewing and editing of memo fields, and a range of other facilities includes simple selection of fields, deletion of duplicate records, and copying of selections to Clipboard for pasting to another file or program.
Notably, CDBF also lets you select cells in an Excel file and paste them to CDBF. This will be useful for data presentation purposes, but it also means that Excel users can avail themselves of the added features of the CDBF interface if they think they can make use of them.
You can adjust column width, append, insert, delete, pack, truncate, and zap data. Headers and aliases are featured, as are search and replace, Go To record or field, fill, relations, refresh, append from, encrypt, erase, recall, sum data, copy table structure to Clipboard in different formats via it's Field Info dialogue, use "Group By" to summarise a table by fields, compare two tables with the facility to copy values from one table to another, filter tables or review them in reverse order, "Sort By" for fields, as well as print your output, of course. These are just some of the many facilities that CDBF offers.
In conclusion
Inexpensive, and with the option to learn commands via "tip of the day" - it's the program's only tutorial, otherwise it's a case of try it - CDBF could be valued by database users who feel restricted by the limitations of their own programming skills, or the inherent restrictions of the host software.
