RE database import

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Golly, I remember DataPerfect. It did ship as part of one of the WP
suites, IIRC. Do you say it's still around? Could you send me the URL
(off list, unless someone else might be interested)? I HATE modern
Windows databases: they violate one of the first principles of
relationality by rolling data, code, and forms into one huge file.
Idiotic. But not merely is dBase ancient, its docs were written by
Ananias, Munchhausen, and Co.
Anyway, XyWrite's database filters are just for dbf files (the dBase data
format, which is still something of a least common denominator). If you
can export DataPerfect to dBase, you might be able to use them, though I
suspect you should run them outside of XyWrite, to avoid the Out of
Memory problems that sometimes arise. You could also try finessing the
export--to whatever format--from within DP to get just the fields you
want and in the order you want. But using FISHOUT could be a good
solution. The other thing you might want to look at is using the file,
imported as a text file, as a mail-merge data file. That way, you could
have different form files for different arrangements of the data (e.g.
author-date or traditional author-short title citation). A great pity
that Ibid for XyWrite never worked.
Patricia