willcox@urbana.mcd.mot.com (David A Willcox) (10/30/90)
About a week ago, I got a copy of Dollar and $ense version 5.0. I thought I'd report a problem I encountered for any of you out there that might be considering an upgrade from 4.1. I've used version 4.1c for several years, and except for a few irritating bugs and limitations, I've been pretty happy with it. I played with version 5.0 for a while. The most irritating 4.1c bug (corrupted file if you delete a transaction that uses the same account for both funding and distribution) has been fixed, and you have a bit more control over the columns in a report. The ability to bind common operations to icons is nice. You have some more control over the format of printed checks, but not really enough to deal with normal, small checkbook-like checks, and the method of dealing with different check formats for different accounts is one of the biggest kludges I've ever seen in a commercial package. (Definitely a bug documented to turn it into a feature.) HOWEVER, there is one problem that I consider major and glaring, and renders the new version useless, at least as far as I am concerned: You can't recover unused space in the account file. In 4.1c, when your account file grew too large (I consider anything that doesn't fit on an 800k floppy to be "too large"), you could archive some of the old transactions and "Save a Copy As" the account file. The new account file would be smaller by about the size of the archived transactions. Unfortunately, a bug in 5.0 means that "Save As" does not recover unused space in the account file. For me, that means that my account file is well over 1 Mb, even with all of last year's transactions archived. Of course I kept the old 4.1c version of the file to go back to. The technical support people at Software Tookworks assure me that they know about this problem, are asking the programmers to fix it, and that I will get a fix when it is available. No ETA for a fix, however. (When I talked with them, they were only just building their list of problems.) I'd recommend waiting until this problem is fixed before ordering Dollars and $ense 5.0. (You can tell them I told you that.) David A. Willcox "Just say 'NO' to universal drug testing" Motorola MCD - Urbana UUCP: ...!uiucuxc!udc!willcox 1101 E. University Ave. INET: willcox@urbana.mcd.mot.com Urbana, IL 61801 FONE: 217-384-8534