Content area
Full text
I agreed to review askSam 3.0 Professional without ever having seen the program before. I knew that it had a reputation as a good free-text indexing program, but was unprepared for just how much more I'd be seeing. When the package arrived, it certainly gave no inkling of the wealth of features inside. If you've ever installed a cutting-edge word processor, like Microsoft Word, you know that modern programs require lots of disks, or perhaps even CD-ROMs-askSam Pro comes on only two floppy disks.
But don't let the size fool you. askSam Pro is a serious and sophisticated tool with strengths far beyond freetext indexing. It includes facilities for word processing, HTML development, structured data entry, import of a wide variety of data formats, report generation, field recognition, and one of the most sophisticated sets of searching tools I've ever seen.
I installed and tested askSam on my desktop computer, a Pentium 150MHz computer with 32MB of RAM. askSam came with two manuals, a Getting Started set of tutorials, and a User's Guide. These are well organized and easy to follow.
FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS
askSam files are composed of documents. Each document can be almost any collection of data that you'd be interested in using. This flexibility allows you to collect spreadsheets, plain text, word-processed text, database output, email messages, HTML files, and lots more into a single, comprehensive whole. Each of these documents, or the file as a whole, can be indexed and set into fields. After that, a wide variety of search techniques is guaranteed to provide several different ways to access your information. Indexing your documents provides blazingly fast retrieval. Finally, a reasonably good report generator allows you to output your information in almost any way you'd like.
At first look, askSam appears to be a word processor. In fact, its main input window (Figure 1), looks just like a word processor at first glance. There are the usual icons for file operations: cut, copy, paste, font type and size, bold, italic, underline, etc. One difference is the presence of the large search input box, a tool you'll use frequently as you become acquainted with askSam's numerous search capabilities. If you're interested in using askSam as a word processor, you'll find that...