Our data was in Microsoft Word, not exactly the best platform for organizing the contact information for nearly one hundred people, and nearly useless for easily being able to tell who has paid their fees and who hasn't.

The basic import
I started by cutting and pasting the data into Excel, and then had Excel export to a CSV. CSV is a Comma Separated Values format with commas separating each piece of information. At last I was ready to import the membership data into HanDBase. I was pleasantly surprised to find that HanDBase brought the data in quickly and easily. For the sake of the members' confidentiality, I am blurring out their information in the screen shots.

Figure A shows how the data appears in HanDBase, with an inset of how it appears on the handheld. In both cases, it's clear and functional, but not very fancy. For a lot of applications, this might be all you would need.

FIGURE A

You can see the same data in HanDBase on the desktop and on the handheld. Click picture for a larger image.

It was almost certainly all I needed for my band list, and yet there was a whole other area to review: HanDBase's Forms Designer. This program promises to make your data look more like a regular software program, and it delivers.

Designing forms
Breaking my usual routine, I actually read the Forms Designer manual. I didn't find the software intuitive at first; choosing "Open" to get to forms I hadn't yet created didn't seem right to me. If you think of it, though, that you are opening an existing database to add forms, it makes more sense. Forms Designer is available on the handheld and the desktop. I expected to find it easier to use on the desktop, but I was wrong.

On the desktop, it's not clear exactly how much screen space you actually have. I set up an elaborate design, only to discover when I synchronized that it didn't fit well at all. As different handhelds have different amounts of screen space, I can understand why this is, but it did turn me off the desktop version.