From:
                                                                    to 15:44
Subject: XFER and *SHEET

Maybe this is some overdue information, but recently I have used the
XFER-program by Mark De Weger, and it helped me out really good.
Thanks Mark for this perfect soft!

The reason why I used the program is that someone in  my family had a beeb
computer which failed from time to time. The owner (my uncle) liked to
secure his data, and asked me to transfer it into a DOS environment, with
the possibility of modifying.

Reading his 5¼"floppydisks directly in my PC failed (I used ANADISK,
BEEBDOS,...if anyone can tell me what I did wrong...), I had to look for
something else. Downloaded XFER, tried it out and installed it onto the
beeb. The file transfer works very neat, my uncle still has the possibility
to re-transfer it to the beeb (if he likes, as he isn't that familiar with
the DOS environ-ment).

Now if you want to edit the data which has been transferred, here is what I
found out.

Opening text-based files (*WORD V2.1 on the beeb) is directly possible in a
word processing program (I checked different files with WORD as well as
WPWIN). As for that kind of data, everything is possible, thus perfect.

Now the difficult part: spreadsheets...

Reading the (transferred) data from a beeb-spreadsheet (*SHEET V1.0) on a PC
is unfortuna-tely not possible (as I expected, ASCII transfer...). So I had
to find a way to read and store the data in such a way that a modern
spreadsheet program could read the sheets, made on the beeb.
Here is my solution (one of the x that works):
The needs:
a PC that works out the communication between itself and the beeb (I'll call
it PC1)
a second PC that captures the transferred data (named PC2)
a beeb (of course)

First of all, you have to make some additional hardware for the transfer.
Modify the serial cable (as described in the SERCABLE.TXT file from Mark),
solder a 2 wire screened cable on top of the cable made for the file
transfer in this way:
Pin     Pin     PC1                     Pin     Beeb                    Pin
Pin     PC2
(9)     (25)                                                            (9)
(25)
5       7       GND             1       GND             5       7       GND
2       3       RXD             2       TD data out     2       3       RXD
3       2       TXD             3       RD data in
etc...

Check out if your cable works. Start the XFER program on both PC1 and the
beeb. Use a terminal program on PC2 (I used Telix, but any program will
do...), check the communication port settings (9600,N,8,1). If everything
works fine, you can go to (T)erminal mode on PC1 and execute some commands
on the beeb. PC2 will "snoop" your serial link and (the interesting part of
it) create the possibility to write your serial ASCII transfers to a file...

Part 2.
The spreadsheet in the beeb has a command called SCREEN. The annoying thing
is that it only screens the data which has been selected for a printout.If
you need to save only that data to a file (because it is old data that you
won't be using any longer), you're ready to go to part 3.

To clarify the process of transferring, I used an old account file, it's
saved under the name ACCNT85.S, and occupies cell A1 to AC67.
The area programmed to be printed out:
P0 from A1 to A16, P1 from C1 to F16, P2 from A67 to A67and P3 from AA67 to
AC67.

I'm not gonna explain the whole process of how to work with the beeb or
selecting areas of data to be printed out for a beeb-spreadsheet (there is a
lot of info on the net, that is if you haven't the original manual of
VIEWSHEET), but basically you just have to do this:
Start the VIEWSHEET program (*SHEET). Load the file into the program
(ACCNT85.S) by typing L ACCNT85.S The beeb loads the sheet, you can enter
the program by pressing ESC.

First of all check out how many colums and rows are used for the particulary
sheet. Note the last cell (AC67 in our example) and select the area to be
saved like this:
Press F1 (EDIT WINDOW) P0. The beeb gives you a reply line like this:
Wi      TopL   BotR     Pos     Cw      Bw      Fmt     Opt
P0      A1        A16            7       7      FRM  TS
With the CTRL button pressed, you can shift the cursor. Move it until it is
positioned on A         from A16 ( BotR line). Now type in AC67 and press
ENTER.

The print area is now set from A1 to AC67. Press ESC again to access the
command mode, and save the file settings (S ACCNT85.S). Your spreadsheet is
now ready to send the complete file-data towards the outer world (i.e.
RS423)

Part 3...saving the data.
Start XFER both on the beeb and PC1. Start up the terminal program on PC2.
Select (T)erminal mode on PC1, select the correct drive which contains the
data to be sent, and launch the *SHEET program. Load the file. PC2 nicely
snoops everything you do.
Select Download a file in ASCII on PC2, give it a name (ACCNT85_S.TXT ?) and
you're ready to go! Type SCREEN on PC1. The data is transferred and scrolls
over the three screens...when ready, you press ESC on PC2 (to end the
capture to file) and you're settled!

Now you can import this "converted" spreadsheet into EXCEL or LOTUS, a menu
pops up to tell you that it is a really old kind of spreadsheet (didn't we
know that already?), but gives you way to import and modify it. And that is
what we wanted (at least my uncle did...)

I hope it can be of use for some of you ... let me know something if it
does.
I'll be happy if all this text wasn't written in vain.

Mail me...

Luc
luc.goossens@vtm.be