In a message dated 08/29/2001 1:01:54 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

>
>  If you can dump everything out into XML, for example, that seems like a
good
> thing.  Imagine dumping all of your records into CSV format, or
Tab-delimited.
> ..and then trying to import it into a new system...play with it using
> whatever database you have at hand and Excel, going back
>  and forth a few times if you don't know what I mean.  Better than nothing,
> though.  How about ASCII?  That would be fun...
>
The museum I volunteer at uses Past Perfect.  Most of the volunteers are
considerably older than I am (I'm retired) and they are having real problems
using the software.  The computers available are not even capable of running
PP version 3 without significant upgrades. Consequently presently the only
access to the collection is by physically searching the shelves.

For the last 20 years I have been making lists of objects in my and the
museum's collections in plain ASCII text, formatted with commas so that they
can be imported into many spreadsheets as CSV.  There are about 20,000 lines
(one line per object) in these lists now; mostly documentation and A-V
materials. If I see a query on a Listserv that may relate to one of them, I
just click on the file and use the Find command of WordPad to locate it, and
copy the entry to a reply.  Printed copies from the lists are formatted on
the fly by simple BASIC programs.

I have found this to be very useful. I have found no one who doesn't laugh at
the idea.

The computer I have been using for this, a PC-1 (the 64K motherboard/160K
floppy drives) has just died.  I have, of course, been transferring the lists
to my modern computers, but the printing software is in IBM BASIC's
compressed format.  Does anyone know of a conversion program that will
convert these .bas files to ASCII so I can use them in QuickBasic without
rewriting them?

Mike Csontos

P.S.: The software used for most of the data entry eas EDLIN!!!

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