The Cardbox Book

Why do we call it a book and not a manual? Because we’ve seen what’s happened to computer manuals. Once upon a time you could hope to learn your way around a product just by reading its manual. No longer. Today, manuals are mostly detailed lists of commands and step-by-step instructions for performing every conceivable operation, without any suggestion of what the basic concepts are, of what this product is actually about. If travel guidebooks resembled these manuals, they’d spend all their time teaching you how to use the ticket machines in the railway stations and they’d never say anything about what being in a country was really like.

The Cardbox Book's aim is to give you an understanding of what Cardbox is all about: what it’s useful for, how it works, how it thinks. We reckon that once you’ve got these things under your belt, the mere step-by-step details are easy. Either they’ll be obvious already and you won’t have to think about them, or you can press a key and look them up in the Help. But the understanding has to come first, and that’s what this book is for.

The Cardbox Book is 300 pages long, with many colour illustrations. It is backed by unique "Help Points" - electronic footnotes in the help file, giving you additional explanations and detailed examples. It also contains a gallery of inspiring examples of how people have used Cardbox, and worked exercises showing you how to create basic Cardbox databases. The accompanying CDROM contains sample databases for you to use for practice or as a basis for your own designs.

Our goal has been to make something so interesting, and so clear, that you’d buy it to read on the train even if you didn’t own a computer. Perhaps that’s impossible, but we’ve had fun trying; and the result is a lot closer to the ideal than any other computer book we’ve ever seen. You can download some sample chapters here.

A copy of The Cardbox Book comes with every copy of the Professional Edition of Cardbox, and the Home Edition is built round a customised version of the same book.

If you have downloaded the Client Edition and want to learn all about it, or if you have a multi-user installation of the Professional Edition and need additional copies, you can order The Cardbox Book through any Cardbox distributor, or from Amazon.

Part One: Orientation

Introduction; getting help; reliability and support; installing and managing Cardbox.

Part Two: Concepts

The concepts of Cardbox - a complete guide to fields, formats, records and other fundamental concepts.

Part Three: Search and Retrieval

Opening and closing Cardbox; opening databases; workspaces.

Browsing through your records; browsing and viewing images.

Searching the database; what you can search for; searching the index; searching through record data; tags and tagged searches; kept selections; advanced search commands.

Sorting; changing the format; changing the appearance.

Printing and the Print command; printing images; the Print Preview command; the Printer Settings command; paper sizes and label types.

Export and communication; totalling.

Part Four: Editing

Adding records; editing records; deleting records; spelling checker; using validators; batch editing.

Adding images; rearranging and deleting images.

Deduplication.

Part Five: Creation

How to create a database; details of format design; how to edit or create a format; the format design screen; validators.

Part Six: Inspiration

A gallery of personal and business uses of Cardbox, taken from real applications by real users; exercises and samples (the sample databases are available on the CDROM).

Part Seven: Safety and Security

Backup and disaster recovery; passwords and user profiles; encryption.

Part Eight: Macros

Macro facilities in Cardbox - a brief introduction. The separate Macros and Programming book covers macros in detail.

Sample page