David B. Adams

The tutorials in this book focus on common business tasks, such as, personnel and sales management, invoicing and inventory, financial reports and direct mail.

Q&A was first released by Symantec in 1985 for PC-compatibles running MS-DOS. It consisted of two programs: (1) a flat-file database program and (2) a word processing program. It soon gained a following of loyal users. Q&A can still be found in use as I write this review in October 2008.

Q&A 4 is aimed at the small business person who is not a database expert. The program is perfect for organizing contacts, mailing lists, and simple inventory.

Q&A 4 occupied the top spot in the flat-file database market in 1991. It offered the user both a Form View and a Spreadsheet View of data. It featured a simple control panel that critics compared favorably to the controls of a VCR, allowing you to quickly move around inside a database. The Q&A flat-file database program partly mimicked the capabilities of a relational database by allowing users to take data from an active database and post it to external files. Or, it was just as easy for users to look up information in external files and import it into the active database. This export/import capability made the Q&A Database popular for such business transactions as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll.

The Q&A 4 word processing program, called Write, could be launched either from the Q&A Graphical User's Interface or as a stand-alone application. It featured a 100,000 word spell check, a 660,000 word thesaurus, a dictionary, columnar formatting, and the ability to insert graphics images into documents. Write also had the ability to hot-link cells from a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet into a Write document.

Q&A Write was made even more popular by Jerry Pournelle. He wrote a regular column for Byte Magazine where he frequently spoke fondly of Q&A Write. He said that it was his sole word processor. He used it not only for writing his columns for Byte, but for writing his Science Fiction novels. Dr. Pournelle liked Q&A Write for its simplicity as a basic word processor.

Here is a feature that I wish Microsoft Office had taken to heart through its many renderings. Q&A 4 is fully backwards compatible with earlier versions of Q&A.

Sales and support of Q&A 4 were halted in 1998. If there were such a thing as a Software Hall of Fame, I believed that Q&A 4 would be found on display among the "classics."

An excellent review of Q&A 4 can be found here: Stephen W. Plain "Q&A takes the pain out of databases - Symantec's Q&A for Windows 4.0 data base management system - Software Review - Evaluation". Home Office Computing. . FindArticles.com. 30 Oct. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_n4_v12/ai_15096965… (meer)