J.E.Lawrie HINTS-4. v.2 Changing the Battery Before changing a battery, and especially if it is "flat", or may be flat, take out any EPROM in slot 3 or it may get corrupted. Cataloguing Files. If you are looking at the files in a RAM, by selecting "Cataloguing Files", you will see, if there are more than six, an instruction at the left side saying to use SPACE or ESC. You MUST do this. You should really never use anything but ESC to leave the Filer or you could have "in use" problems i.e. there is a file in the RAM that you can't erase, rename or copy. The only cure for this condition is a Soft Reset. Selective Printing. The facility of the Z88 to select single or multiple rows for printing is not well covered by the manual or thhe various books. The manual has a section on "Printing selected rows" (page 54/55 in 3rd Ed.) which covers one form of selection but usually one just wants to print just some of the rows in, and not the whole, document - what to do ? After <>PO (to print) one can choose to print only some of the columns e.g typing B D will print columns B,C and D - no problems. The last question, if N is changed to Y will allow the printing to stop between pages until ENTER is pressed - very useful. The middle one is confusing but need not be. First you must enter Y. Suppose you only want to print up to and including row 30: you enter ROW<31 For rows after 30 to the end: you enter ROW>30 For rows starting at 30 and finishing at 45 you enter ROW>29&ROW<46 - very easy. Don't worry if you see your figures still there when you next use <>PO for the same file. There will be an `N' there and if you don't change this to a "Y' it won't be operational. Merging in Pipedream. Another neglected "goodie". Best illustrated by an example from your own files. Select anything on file for Pipedream. Load it and take the cursor to the end of the file. Now load another file but this time put Y against the first question and ENTER. The second file will be added at the point where you left the cursor. Now, be careful! If this is to be a new file it must be given a new name. Use <>FC , delete the name you find there and type in the new one before ENTERing and then use <>FS to save it. You can go straight to <>FS of course but using <>FC is a good discipline - it prevents a slip which will put the new file in place of the second original. From screen to Pipedream It can be very useful to "capture" what appears on screen and send it to a Pipedream file, though in a slightly curious way. Go to the Filer, any RAM, and type [],+,and S ([] is the square key - aren't they all?). Then press ENTER twice and the directory contents scroll up (no hesitation, you notice this time AND you will see "CLI" at the right of the screen). Now press [],-,and S to cancel the CLI. Now to Pipedream and <>FL :*//S.sgn and ENTER as plain text - now erase S.sgn from :RAM.- IMMEDIATELY! END Back to HINTS-INDEX