Here are the major Features of Easy Data:

    The main feature is its ability to permit the user to create his own small data bases without having any special knowledge, and without massive programming efforts.

    This disk has a series of small programs in Extended Basic with Assembly routines already embedded in them.  The user need not have more than a small amount of knowledge of Extended Basic, and needs no knowledge of Assembly whatsoever.  The instructions provided on the disk, plus some ideas about what kind of data and how much, should be enough to let the user create a very easy to use data base.

NOTE WELL:  This disk is NOT designed for keeping any "all world" data bases, as the limits of memory are still there, and all of the program and DATA has to be stored in the 24K of high memory expansion.  A list of your close friends and close family would be fine, but not a city directory unless you live in a very small city.

    One of the most valuable features in this program is its ability to sort the data on any field, with any other field as a secondary sort.  In the sample program BIGDEMO, supplied on the disk, there are data records containing Last Name, First Name, street address, city, state, and zip code, each as a separate field.  The user can choose any of those as the primary sort criterion, and any other one as secondary sort.  Let's suppose you wanted to do the "normal" thing.  You'd choose to sort by Last name as primary, then First name as secondary.  This would create a sorted list where the records would appear in last-name order, but if two or more people had the same last name (as in a family data base) those with the same last name would be sorted in order by first names.  To put that another way, if and only if there's a "tie" between two records on the primary sort does the program resort to the secondary sort to break the tie.

    The user could choose to sort by state as primary and zip code as secondary, and that too would work, sorting everyone by state, and then within a state by zip codes.  The user can make his own choices, as the program doesn't care.

    All of the sorting process is done by an embedded Assembly routine, working from user-supplied DATA lines in the Extended Basic part of the program.  Depending on the situation, the user can choose to have certain fields sort on a numeric basis instead of as strings, simply by assigning numeric variable names instead of string variable names to those fields.  The user can add to his data base at any time by just tacking on more DATA lines at the end of the XB program.

    The disk contains two demo programs, a "skeleton" program which the user flshes out with his own data, and a couple of "merge" files that enhance the package.  The whole thing comes on just one disk, with on-disk instructions, and all that's needed to use the stuff is a 32K memory, Extended Basic, and disk drive.  Give this one a try, and you'll probably like it.