Software Reviews : FACTFINDER,Version 1.0 Reviewed by Stan Littlefield,North Carolina State University Publisher: MACWARE Products,Forethought,Inc.,1973 Landings Drive,Mountain View,CA 94043 (telephone: 1-800-MACWARE [Pacific Time]) Year of Publication: 1985 Materials: One Macintosh diskette,one manual (84 pages,indexed) Price: $125.00 Machine Specificity: Apple Macintosh System Requirements: Minimum 128K,1 drive (a 512K system would enhance speed of operation) Effectiveness: Excellent User-Friendliness: Excellent Documentation: Excellent

Abstract

Summary: FACTFINDER is a free-form filing system (coded "fact- sheets") allowing heuristic coding and search without resort to establishing database fields. The "Quick Tour" and on-screen demo can be mastered in about 20 minutes, and the documentation is concise, clear, and comprehensive. The program is disk-based, which does not limit the number of factsheets based on memory size. However, the size of a factsheet and the speed of search is considerably augmented with a 512K system. FACTFINDER can interface with other programs and be used to break down a MACWRITE document-obviously an excellent tool for coding interview or text data. The present version is copy-protected but as of this writing an enhanced, unprotected version is being released. Replacement and upgrading are fully supported, and MACWARE has an excellent customer service hotline.