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^C^1Master Indexer
^Cby
^CDavid Leithauser

   If you're an avid reader of magazines, it's likely you frequently encounter 
articles on subjects of interest to you.  Maybe months or years later you find 
yourself remembering an old article relevant to something you're doing now.  
Being something of a packrat, you haven't yet thrown out that old magazine; 
however a problem arises when you go to look up the article for reference.  
Exactly what magazine was it in, anyway?  Was it the June, 1974 ^1National 
^1Geographic^0 or the September, 1973 ^1Smithsonian^0?  Or maybe it was in ^1Life^0
sometime in 1972?  You end up searching through a huge stack before you finally 
find the article (if you're lucky).

   This program helps you solve this problem.  As you're reading the latest 
issue of your favorite magazine, and you encounter an article of interest (or 
perhaps a program of interest, if it's a diskmagazine) take some time to boot up 
your PC, run Master Indexer, and enter the article into your personal database.

   All you do is input the subject you'd like the article indexed by (the 
"reference") and the issue in which the article is located (the "location), and 
it is entered into your records.  For instance, if the article on Psychohistory 
in the April issue of ^1Analog Science Fiction/Fact^0 struck your fancy, type the 
reference "Psychohistory" and the location "Analog, 4/88."  Then later, when 
you wish to find references to that subject, use the lookup feature, and type 
the word "Psychohistory" (or a substring of it; typing "psycho" will yield this 
article too, along with any entries you might have made about madmen who kill 
people in showers) and the listing will pop up.  If you make several entries on 
the same subject, they will be concatenated into one longer entry.  You can also 
look up by magazine title, for instance if you want to see all the articles in 
^1Byte^0 that you have indexed.  In addition, you can generate a full, alphabetized
list of your entries to your screen or a printer.

   You can create more than one index if you want: for instance, one index of 
computer-related articles and another of science-fiction stories.  Or, if you're 
doing scholarly research, you might want to use this program to keep your 
bibliographic data, creating an index file for each paper you're working on, 
entering all books and articles you use in your research.

   Since you can use multiple index files, you must load the index file you want 
from disk at the start of your session, and save it again when you're done.  
When the program starts up, there's no data in memory; you must load a file 
(such as the sample file "ARTICLES" on this disk) before you can do any 
searches.  Or, enter data of your own starting with a clean slate, then save it 
under a different filename.  (Use your own blank, formatted disk; there's not 
much room on this one for saving files.)

   When you load an index file while you already have index data in memory, you 
will be asked if you want to clear the present data before you load new data.  
If you say no, the data from disk will be merged with the data in memory, so 
both data sets are now in memory together.  If you say yes, the data in memory 
will be wiped out (you'll be given a chance to save it first) and the new data 
will replace it.

   One more point:  when you enter a location that doesn't contain a number, you 
will be warned of this fact, since the preferred mode of entry is to give a 
designation including an issue number or date.  If what you typed is what you 
meant, you can make Master Indexer enter it anyway by pressing ENTER.

   NOTE:  If you're intrigued by any of the items listed in back issues of BIG 
BLUE DISK in the sample index, please note that all back issues remain in print 
and are available from us for $9.95 each (less if you buy in quantity).  Write 
for a complete back issue catalog and order form, or call in your order at
(800) 831-2694.

   To run this program from outside the BIG BLUE DISK menu, type ^1INDEXER^0.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES:
^FINDEXER.EXE
^FBRUN30.EXE
^FRETURN30.EXE
^FARTICLES
