Details of Lewis Letter Magic
On the screen, display details about the person or company. You can do the following activities:
DATABASE

For each name you record standard information such as name, address and telephone, and special information specific to your own business.

User-defined Fields. As part of its special information a club wants to store the membership number of its members, so a separate field called "Membership Number" with a length of 6 characters is set up. You can establish seven user-defined fields and for each you specify its descriptive name and its length.

Dates. A sales organisation wants to record the date of last contact with each prospect. You can set up two date fields each with a descriptive name such as "Last Contact" or "Date Paid to".

For company names the program lets you record the name and position of the contact.

If all the names are individuals, you would be able to omit fields for contact, position or fax.

Consider the name "Mrs Helen Brown". Obviously you want this sorted under Brown rather than Mrs. Enter the name as "Brown; Helen; Mrs" and it will sort under BROWN. The semi-colon will be used as a 'pivot' so that the name will be printed as "Mrs Helen Brown" in letters, labels and reports.

Multiple categories. A club can distinguish the status of its members by using different categories for Ordinary Member, Junior, Associate, Family Member, Office-bearer, etc. A doctor could categorise names into Patient, Doctor, Solicitor, Insurance Company, etc. You can identify 36 categories and any one name can belong to as many as six categories.

LETTER WRITING

If you write letters frequently many of your letters will be similar. Dr Lewis has analysed the ways in which business letters are similar and has designed Lewis LETTER MAGIC so that you can produce your letters fast.

If you are writing a standard letter you only have to enter the name of the standard letter and the letter will be printed immediately. The program can display the names of your standard letters for ready reference.

When you commence writing a letter to a person, the letter automatically starts with the name, address and date.

The Lewis LETTER MAGIC word-processor lets you type the letter. You can move the cursor so that you can insert words anywhere. You can make corrections by overtyping or by deleting characters, words, lines or paragraphs.

If you write a lot of letters some phrases will appear time and time again. Standard phrases can be inserted with a minimum of effort. An electrician or plumber may use some standard paragraphs when preparing quotes. Again Lewis LETTER MAGIC lets you easily include prepared paragraphs.

You can put your sign-off "Yours sincerely, etc" at the end of the letter by pressing the F3 function key.

The jump feature is very powerful for letters which are identical except at positions where a piece of variable information will be inserted.

A receipt letter might start with "Thank you for your cheque for $100.00". Obviously the amount will vary. With Lewis LETTER MAGIC you use the symbol @J to indicate a jump marker, so in your standard letter, paragraph or phrase write "Thank you for your cheque for $@J.00". When you edit this letter use the F5 function key to jump to the next jump marker, where the @J will disappear and the cursor will be placed in readiness for you to enter the correct amount.

The word-processor is very easy to use, and makes use of the function keys, for example F4 prints the letter. There is a help menu to display the different commands.

As well as letters the program can produce other documents such as memos, fax messages and fees due notices.

ALL-NAME ACTIVITIES

Lewis LETTER MAGIC is very good for producing a letter which will be sent to all or many of the names. Each letter will contain the name, address and other information from your database.

The program lets you easily select the names of those people who are to receive the letter. You can select all names belonging to any category or group of categories. You can also select by any data field, for example all names in Queensland would be selected by postcodes between 4000 and 4999.

As well as letters you can produce other documents, address labels and reports for a selection of the names.

If your computer is connected to more than one printer, you will be able to avoid the aggravation of changing stationery as letters, labels and reports can be directed to different printers.

Normally the names would be printed in alphabetic order but could be printed in the order of any data field. If you want to take advantage of postal concessions for pre-sorted mail, you could print address labels in postcode order, or you could even have a user-defined field for the national postal sorting plan code.

Reports. When you produce a report you sometimes want to print all the information on the computer, but it is more likely that you are only interested in some specific information such as telephone numbers or a list of members whose fees are overdue. In addition to letting you select which names appear on the report Lewis LETTER MAGIC lets you choose which items will be printed.

Reports can be displayed on the screen, printed or written to an ASCII file.

Interface With Lewis Accounts Receivable

Lewis ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE is a package for debtors and invoicing, which shares with Lewis LETTER MAGIC the database of names. From the Lewis LETTER MAGIC screen display you can transfer to Lewis ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE and display account details or produce an invoice. If you change database information such as address in one program, the change will have been automatically made in the other program.

Conversion from other systems. Suppose you have a substantial number of names in a file from another program or database. In many cases Lewis LETTER MAGIC is able to read data from another file and convert it to its own format.

Hardware Requirements.

Lewis LETTER MAGIC runs on IBM-compatible computers with a hard disk and 640kb RAM. DOS must be version 3 or later. All print-outs can be printed on 80-column printers, but can make use of wider printers. If your computer is connected two printers, labels can be printed on one and letters on the other. The video can be colour or mono.

Lewis LETTER MAGIC topics: Introduction | Details | Upgrades | Prices | Multi-User


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