![]() It's fast to move around in, faster than a list view you could create in a form, and has the added advantage of working much like a spreadsheet, which can be powerful and confusing. The Data Sheet is a spreadsheet-like view of your database with the fields in columns and the records in rows. For those of you with newer Macs or MacRecorders, Panorama II even has Flash Audio, which lets you include sound in your database.ĭata & Design - Things you won't find in FileMaker Pro include the Data Sheet and the Design Sheet, both of which are holdovers from previous versions of Panorama and even go back to OverVUE. For those of you who prefer to click buttons and choose things from pop-up menus, Panorama II does all those things (including checkboxes and radio buttons) and the buttons especially are trivial to set up. The scrapbook can even hold imported EPS graphics. Once an image is in there, using it only generates a pointer rather than an image, saving disk space. It always takes some effort to design a nice screen layout, but Panorama II helps you out with its internal scrapbook, called the Flash Art Scrapbook. I wonder if Aldus has a patent on those guides? Snapping grids and a cursor with tracer lines to the rulers just don't quite match up. (Picky, aren't I?) ProVUE has obviously put a lot of time and effort into their layout tools, and while they are very good on the whole, I'd kill for movable guides like PageMaker has. You can create multiple layouts and customize them with relatively sophisticated graphical layout tools, better than are in FileMaker Pro but not the level of Canvas, for instance. :-)įorms - Panorama II is based on the concept of the form as a window into a certain set of data, much as FileMaker Pro uses layouts. Obviously ProVUE doesn't want you exporting out of Panorama II all that often. Every action that I've performed with Panorama II from opening a database to saving and quitting has been similarly fast with sole exception of exporting text, which is a bit slower. Sorting the database on a field takes a little longer, but only a few seconds at most. I'm not going to do benchmarks, but suffice it to say that with my SE/30 I have yet to notice any delay in finding a single record in my 1000-record address database, which has quite a few fields. Of course, the price ProVUE had to pay the RAM devil is that databases cannot grow beyond the limits of memory, but I think that's becoming less of an issue these days with cheap RAM and virtual memory. This shrinks Panorama II files so that they are only a third to a quarter the size of an equivalent file in another database. The other advantage Panorama II reaps from running in RAM is that it doesn't require the indexing structure that most databases use for fast searching. ProVUE tells me that the default memory setting is enough RAM to open a 600K database. The program is 600K on disk and prefers 976K of RAM, although it can run with less. Panorama II gets its speed from running directly in RAM, and even there it is efficient. To be fair, I've heard people say that FileMaker Pro speeds up significantly if you put it in a RAM disk, but that's a kludge and may not be possible on a machine with only a few megabytes of RAM. Actually, since you can create multiple forms in Panorama II that correspond to FileMaker Pro's layouts and since both databases can run with multiple users over a network, the main difference I've found is that Panorama II is blindingly fast in comparison to FileMaker Pro. I'm no expert with FileMaker Pro, but I believe that the two are fairly comparable in terms of abilities, although I think that PanTalk is more full-featured than FileMaker Pro's scripting language. Panorama II Introduction - Panorama II is a flat-file database, but it sports a rather powerful programming language called PanTalk that includes lookup statements to achieve much of the relational features of the high-end databases. But I didn't have to because of Panorama II from ProVUE Development. I'm sure much of that was my fault, and I know of ways that I could have done things better. I'll admit that I'm no database guru, although I have worked with Double Helix a bunch, rescued some data from an old version of R:Base, and fiddled with various other programs.įor a long time I used HyperCard to do all my database work, but I was always frustrated by the way my stacks looked and worked, not to mention the fact that HyperCard is not exactly speedy. I think it's fair to say that everyone has need of some sort of database software, even if only for keeping track of names and addresses.
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