Q&A

Symantec Corporation

10201 Torre Avenue

Cupertino, California 95014

(408) 253-9600

Requires 512K RAM, two diskette drives or hard drive, DOS 2.0 or later. $299.00.

One of the shortcomings of most personal computer software is the inability to converse with the software in English. Q&A from Symantec Corporation overcomes this limitation by combining word processing, filing, and reporting with a device called the Intelligent Assistant, which lets you ask questions about your database by typing English sentences. By using the Intelligent Assistant you can converse with Q&A in plain English, not "English-like" equations or notations that other database programs require.

Q&A is organized into three functional areas - Write, File, and Report, plus the Intelligent Assistant and utilities. Each area is like a seperate program - in fact a close copy of pfs:Write, pfs:File, and pfs:Report - although the functions do share data.  Report, for example, takes data entered through file and presents columnar reports. Write can take data stored in file and insert it into word processing documents to make form letters. And, of course, the Intelligent Assistant works with both file and report to answer queries about your database.

Q&A's word processing is designed for simplicity and ease of use.  Q&A adheres to the model of a typewriter as closely as possible, presenting the outline of a sheet of paper to type on, with a ruler at the bottom of the screen much like a typewriter's {What is that thing called, anyway?}. A typical session might proceed like this: Select "Type/Edit" from the Write menu and type your letter. After you type the letter, you can make corrections or edits by using the cursor keys to move to the text to change, and then deleting words, typing over words, or inserting new words. Once you've perfected your letter, press the "escape" key to move to the Write menu, select "Save" to save the letter on disk so you retain a permanant copy, and then select "Print" to print the letter.

Word processing, of course, offers more features than this simple example shows. With Q&A, you can move sections of text from one place to another, and even from one document to another, letting you create a library of "canned" text to insert in new letters. Searching and replacing lets you locate a word or phrase and replace it with a new word. To control the appearance of your words, Q&A offers text enhancements such as boldface, underline, italics, superscripts, and subscripts. For the overall look of the document, you can control right margin justification, margins, page size, and have Q&A print headers and footers on each page.

Overall, writing with Q&A is as easy as with any other word processing program, and while Q&A lacks many of the features of more expensive programs (footnotes, spell checking, more complicated formats), Q&A's word processing will serve most people very well.

The File part of Q&A lets you work with data on "forms", much like index cards or paper business forms. Once you create a form design and enter your data, you can search for specific forms, print reports and perform calculations, and use the Intelligent Assistant to ask questions about your data. Q&A forms can have titles and legends, as well as labels that define "fields" for typing data. You design the forms yourself, leaving space for each field of data that you want to keep track of. You can position data anywhere on the screen and draw boxes on the form, so you can make Q&A's forms look like the paper forms you're using now. A single form can overflow to up to ten screens for long forms.

After you lay out the position of the fields, you tell Q&A what type of data you will type in each field, such as text, date, time, money, number, yes/no, or keyword. Although having to specify what type of data is in a field takes extra time and thought, it gives Q&A more flexibility and power when dealing with your data. Programs that don't have date types, for example, don't recognize that when you type "12/1/85" you mean "December 1, 1985". Q&A, however, does recognize the meaning of dates, and can sort on dates, search by date, and display dates in various formats.

After you've designed a form, you're ready to enter data. With Q&A, all you do is type your information in each blank, pressing the "enter" or "tab" keys to move to the next field on the form. A great time-saver while entering data is the "ditto" feature, which lets you repeat the data from the previous form. If, for example, the city on the form you're entering is the same as the city on the last form, just press the F5 key, and Q&A fills in the value for you. If you have others enter your data, you can create custom help screens to guide them through data entry.

Other custom features Q&A you can add are default values for fields, which let you automatically insert values into a field. Q&A can perform calculations, so you can automatically calculate shipping charges, or by using date arithmetic, compute payment due dates. Q&A also uses lookup tables, which lets Q&A take a value and look into a table, returning more values. A good use of lookup tables is to create a table with a customer's name, address, telephone, and other data. Then when you type in the name, Q&A can look into the table and fill in the address and telephone fields for you. These features are quite advanced for a simple file manager, but using them will require some study of the manual.

After you've entered all of your data, Q&A gives you several options for retrieving it. The simplest way is to look through the forms one by one, just as you might leaf through a stack of paper forms. If you're only interested in certain forms, then Q&A lets you enter a retrieve specification, which narrows down the stack of forms to just those you want. When you enter a retrieve spec, Q&A presents a blank form. To find your customers in Seattle, for example, just use the tab key to move to the "city" field and type "Seattle". Now your huge stack of forms appears to contain just the forms you want.

Retrieve specs can be more complex; to search for your customers in Seattle or Tacoma, you can enter "Seattle;Tacoma". For date, time, money, and numeric fields you can enter ">100" (greater than 100), "<100" (less than 100), ">100..<200" (greater than 100 and less than 200), "<10/15/85" (before October 15, 1985), and many other variations. If you're keeping track of salespeople, then in the "commissions" field you could type "max 5" and get your top five earners. Finally, you can have Q&A sort the data while it's retrieving, so you can view the forms in alphabetical, chronological, or any other order.

Although you can have File print a form at any time, you'll want to use Report to create columnar reports. When designing a report, you tell Q&A what columns of data to print, what order to print the columns in, and how to sort the data. Q&A can print the total, count, average, and maximum and minimum values at the bottom of a report, and if you sort by state, for example, Q&A can calculate these values as subtotals for each state. You can create new columns by performing calculations on other columns, so if you're keeping track of inventory, you can create a new column called "value" and have Q&A calculate it as the product of the "cost" and "quantity" columns.

Q&A lets you save your report design to disk, and you can have many report designs for each database. Each time you have Q&A print a report, you can enter a retrieve spec just like when searching through forms in the file part of Q&A. This feature lets you print the "telephone list" report for just those employees in the Administration department.

Finally, Q&A offers macros, which are a way of recording keystrokes for playback at a later time. Macros help speedup operation of any program, as you can assign a lengthy series of commands to a single key, or you could assign your name and address to a key. Then to perform the commands or type your name and address, just press the key. Recording macros is easy: just press the macro key, select "Define", press the key you want to use to playback the macro, and go about the task normally. You can save macros on the disk so that you can use them at any time.

FIle and Report together give many people all the filing capability they want. As with Write, File and Report don't have all the features of more expensive database programs, such as the ability of relational programs to work with more than one database at a time, advanced reporting features, and a programming language. What Q&A does offer is a quick start using your data and the Intelligent Assistant, which lets you talk to Q&A in English sentences just as you would instruct a human assistant. Well, almost.

The Intelligent Assistant is a "front end" for issuing commands to File and Report. The Assistant doesn't provide any help with setting up your database; you do all the work there. But once you create the forms and enter some data, then you can enter the Intelligent Assistant part of Q&A.

The first step in using the Assistant is to "teach" the Assistant about your database, a two-phase process. In the first phase, the Assistant examines your forms and builds an internal dictionary. The manual cautions that this process may take some time, and it does. One database with 178 forms took 12 minutes on a floppy diskette system. Fortunately, you do this only once for each database. The second phase involves instructing the Assistant about the nature of your data. This too will take some time - there are eight areas of questions to cover. Some of the questions involve filling in blanks: "Each form contains information about a particular _________". You fill in words such as "employee", "worker", and "servent". Other questions ask what fields of information to display when fulfilling a request for information, what fields contain locations and people's names, units of measure, and alternate field names you want to use, such as "boss" for "supervisor".

These questions are relatively easy to answer. The more difficult questions involve adjectives for money and numeric fields and verbs for all fields. Adjectives let you ask questions such as "Who had a bad month?" or "What are the expensive items?" Teaching about verbs let you assign words of action to fields. If you associate the verb "earn" with the "salary" field, then you can say "How much did Joe Jackson earn?" or "Show me the top 10 earners." How well the Assistant works depends on how skillfully you teach the Assistant.

If you teach the Assistant well, then here's a sampler of the commands you can use:

Count the employees that are in sales.

Where did Jones go to school?

Show me the people with saleries over $50,000.

What time is it?

Whose salary is greater than average?

What's $100.00 times the total accrued vacation?

You can followup questions with other questions or commands:

Who has the lowest bonus?

What department is she in?

Increase her bonus by $300.

Incredible as it may seem, the Assistant can answer these questions correctly. If the Assistant comes across a word it can't deal with, it stops and asks for assistance. You can correct the word if it's mistyped, teach the Assistant about the new word, clarify a meaning for the Assistant, or choose to ignore the word (it's suprising how many words we use don't add any real meaning to the sentence). Once the Assistant digests your command, it presents a stylized English sentence describing its plan of action, which you either or reject. For example, you might type "Show me all the Administration employees and their hobbies, sorted by hobby." The Assistant will respond with

Shall I do the following?

Create a report showing

the Hobbies and

the Full name and

the Department

from the forms on which

the Department is ADMIN

sorted by

alphabetical Hobbies.

It's important to read the plan to make sure the Assistant correctly understands your request. Occasionally, the Assistant warns you that it's having difficulty understanding your request, and that you should carefully read the plan before you confirm. In practice, the Assistant does a very good job of interpreting your commands, as long as it knows the words and concepts you are using.

What could be wrong with such a helpful assistant? First of all, on a floppy diskette system, the Assistant is unbearably slow. After confirming the above request, it took about 20 seconds for the first output to appear, but 15 seconds for the assistant to get ready to accept another command after the end of the output (there were 32 forms in the database). These execution times are not bad; it's just that after seeing the Assistant correctly interpret your request, watching the disk drives spin for even 20 seconds seems like forever.

The second problem with the Assistant is that the level of the Assistant's understanding (and its success in corretly interpreting your requests) depends on how well you teach the Assistant. This itself takes skill and practice. You'll also want to carefully read the proposed plan of action until you gain practice using the Assistant.

Is the Assistant just a gimmick, or a truly useful feature? For the new user, the Assistant does provide quicker access to your data and relief from learning Q&A's system of making queries. The advanced user may find that making the queries and report requests from within the File and Report modules is quicker than using the Assistant. But even advanced users will find the Assistant makes many tasks easier than before.

Summary

Q&A offers three of the functions that almost anyone who works with information needs: writing, filing, and reporting. Q&A's performance and features are very good for a program in its price range, and the Intelligent Assistant is matched by no other program for personal computers. The on-line help is terse, but Q&A comes with an interactive tutorial and a very good manual. Q&A is not copy protected, so you can make backup copies and install the program on a hard drive.

Recommendation

Q&A represents a good value, even if you don't use the Intelligent Assistant. For about $300 you get what costs over $400 from the pfs series of programs. Q&A does require 512K of memory, but Symantec will sell you a 256K memory board for $50, and Symantec offers a $50 rebate for sending them your old word processing or database program. For the new user of computers, or the first time user of word processing and filing, we recommend Q&A. But if you're finding that your present programs are fulfilling your needs, then it's not worth the switch.