Re: bad Awks DB record

[nancy.crawford@slc.davenport.ia.us (Nancy Crawford)]

Jackie Musil wrote,
 
 > I work at an elementary school where our school librarian is
 > using Appleworks on her Apple IIe for a database for books
 > that are checked out to the kids.  Every once in awhile, a
 > particular student's name is brought up to the screen which
 > then freezes the program.
 >
 > I have been searching all over the Internet (and my
 > Appleworks manuals) for a solution to this problem.  I would
 > think that I could create a new database, then copy the old
 > data minus the bad record to the new database.  But how do I
 > eliminate the bad record?
 
There may be some invisible control characters attached to that
student's record that throw AppleWorks. I'll toss out some possible
work-arounds:
 
If the record can be brought on-screen in readable form before it
freezes the program, copy the info off the screen onto paper. Do NOT
TRY to Move or Copy the bad record.
 
Reboot, reload AWKs, then:
 
Try printing the file to disk as a (tab-delimited?) ASCII file then
rebuild the DB from that info.
 
Will it print to the clipboard as a WP file? That may work to
eliminate strangeness. Setup a new DB when you rebuild the DB from
the info. New name. Then if it works properly, you can delete the
munged file and rename the new file to the old name.
 
Or, rename the file and delete everything beyond the first file ...
or the last file and rebuild the DB from there with previously saved
info from the clipboard, ASCII text file, DIF file, or WP.
 
Or, copy a record to clipboard and use it to setup a new DB and move
records that way.
 
Or, use ProSel's Block Warden or Copy II+'s sector editor to edit the
disk, looking for that student's name and changing any really strange
stuff to something innocuous like plain alphabetic characters or
space characters which can be edited. Examine an OK DB first to see
how the setup is supposed to appear.
 
While it's not likely as the source of the problem, has the librarian
tried re-installing  -- or using a new copy of -- AWKs from the
originals?
 
Hope some of this is of help,
nancy crawford@slc.davenport.ia.us
nancyc@pro-aplbytrs.cts.com
n.crawford@GEnie.com


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