XTGold's VIEW

XTGold's VIEW command has been described in a previous TIP. But to remind you, to view the contents of a text file you highlight its name and then hit V. If the file is not straight ASCII, this will probably show lots of formatting commands. If you now hit F XTGold will attempt to convert the on-screen format so that it displays in the proper format as intended by the program that created the file. For this to work, XTGold has to have a viewer for that program - and it has viewers for a vast number of programs, not only word processors but also databases and spreadsheets. It can be much quicker to consult your database in XTGold than to fire up dBase.

XTGold View has a powerful search facility. Key S or F9 and enter the text to search for. On hitting Return the text will be searched for and highlighted if found. Hit the spacebar to search for the next occurrence. And it will retain the text in memory, search for it and highlight it for all subsequent files viewed. For a fuzzy search, * will match up to 80 characters.

Another invaluable facility of View is Gather. When viewing a file, hitting G enables you to mark out a block of text and copy it to a file; subsequent Gathers will be appended to the same file if desired. If the text has previously been Formatted, then the Gathered text will retain this formatting. Another trick up XTGold's sleeve is that if the file to gather to is given as PRN, the text will be printed out immediately. This is useful to extract the essential portions from a large document, or selected records from your database.

Tom Ruben

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