OVER 2 YOU, 021 (16/03/01)

CHURCH ACCOUNTS

We are a Church of England Church in South London and we would like to do our accounts with more user-friendly software.  The present Treasurer is fairly computer literate but whoever takes over in the future may not be as good. We need to have a package that is very easy to learn, use and produce accurate results to send off to the auditor once a year.  Can anyone suggest a package that will suit us? We have not only the church accounts but also those of our hall and any fundraising that we do.
Sarah Bucknell, via email

Data Developments have supplied dedicated software to churches since 1985 and one of our programs (Cashcall) can provide exactly what is required. It not only produces the standard account reports but also church and charity specific reports such as the Statement of Financial Activities (SOFA), in line with the requirements of the Charities Act. For details or a demo CD of our software please telephone 01902 824044 or visit our web site
www.data-developments.co.uk
Stephen Ibbs, 

May I suggest Sarah Bucknell contacts Churchill Systems of Yorkshire at http://www.churchillsystems.co.uk/home.htm, they produce some excellent programs for Church work.

P Sheils,

I am the financial co-ordinator for a medium size Baptist church in Kent and I have used Moneysoft's Money Manager Business Edition for the last 4-5 years and have found it to be all I require. Unlike some of the larger packages, it easy to pick up and requires little or no knowledge of accounting, just basic logic.  Money Manager is just £79.95 and Moneysoft Ltd. can be reached at www.moneysoft.co.uk

Jeff Wilkinson, via email

Before I retired last year as Manager of a Church based National Charity I  was asked many times by Church Treasurers for similar help. I always recommended Quicken, which I found if properly set up was excellent for keeping Church & charity books. The Quicken manual only deals with personal and business finances so I set up some sample records for church accounts which formed the basis of a one day, one to one training session which got many Church Treasurers using their PCs for their Church accounts.
Tony Wakeling,

My company is in the final stages of producing an accounting package with the specific aim of being simple to use for untrained individuals. The target customer is the single person contractor who needs to produce a simple set of accounts each year for Companies House, though it can be structured to meet your needs very easily. The package comes with pre-defined word processing templates (MS-Word or Corel Word Perfect) into which the package will paste your figures to produce your reports, the templates can be edited to meet yours needs. Contact me at paul@hield.freeserve.co.uk for further details.

Paul Hield,

We run our church accounts in an Excel97 workbook with sheets for Income and, Expenditure transactions with links to layout sheets for producing summary accounts for the PCC (and auditor) to meet the Charities Act requirements.  This system does not require any knowledge of Excel, the most difficult decision being which heading to post a given transaction to! This workbook was set up for us by the previous Treasure who is an Accountant.   The current Treasurer is not, but find it easy to use. If Sarah Bucknell would like to email me I can explain more.
Mike Sullivan

FRENCH CHAT

Are there any British residents chat rooms in France?  If so, can anyone supply any addresses?  

Charles Hall, via email

There is a chat room at www.letheil.com. Also the "forums" of La Mairie at www.livingfrance.com will be of interest though the latter are not, I think, chat rooms in the strict sense. Now what would be really fascinating would be to eavesdrop on a chat room for French residents in the UK!

Anthony Lott,

SHADES OF GREY

I have 60 photographs of black and white handprints. I would like to know what area consists of black and white (and also different shades of grey)? Is there a program that can do such a thing? This is for my dissertation experiment, taking 60 Kirlian photographs. I need to measure the change in the corona electrical discharge around the handprints.

Mr.Preston Lee, via email

I have just installed Serif PhotoPlus 5; it's supplied on the cover disc of the April issue of PC Plus, but is also available as a free 6.8MB download from www.serif.com. After a photo has been opened in the program, you can go to Image > Histogram,  and choose the Luminance channel; tracking the cursor across the histogram will give the pixel count at each of the 256 greyscale levels.

Alfred Parson,

CAR RALLIES

I need to plan car rallies without being forced to take the quickest/shortest routes. I can get MS Autoroute to take the roads I choose by inserting zero length stops, but this clutters up the itinerary instructions and covers the map with labels. Does anyone know of a program, which allows 'way-points' to be chosen, without such clutter?
David Dudley, via email

There is an excellent web page at http://www.shellgeostar.com which will give a very detailed route from A to B and will allow stopovers or ‘way points’ to be added to your map which covers the UK and all Europe, which can be printed off with or without the map.You can also personalises your map

Andrew Hawkes,

DANCE STEPS

My wife and I go Ballroom Dancing and when we learn a new figure I try and write down the steps as soon as we get home. The problem is that, in a couple of weeks time, when I go to refresh my memory, the long hand instructions often don't make sense. Before I start the laborious business of doing them myself, does anyone know where I can get the footprint graphics that are often used in books to illustrate the steps?

Laurie Harris

Further to previous replies, another book that may be of use is The Ballroom Dance Pack by Walter Laird published by Dorland Kindersley. This book contains thin cardboard outlines of almost full size male and female pairs of shoes. The idea being that you photocopy these and place them on the floor where your feet should go. It should be possible to scan these to create your own clipart and the complete floor plan for a routine created on a computer. As well as going through the basic steps of the six main dances, the book also contains a CD with practice music played at a slower tempo for beginners.
Grahame Goodacre,

There is a book with these in, it is:"Ballroom Dancing" by Alex Moore Published by Black - £12.99 I have one of the original versions - 1937, but last month I bought the current (ninth) edition too. I am personally making up Ballroom dance sequence diagrams (using a drawing package) that will, hopefully update this concept even further.
Peter J S Brooks,

MUSIC PROGRAMS

As an amateur pianist who is frequently called on to entertain groups of pensioners or disabled folk I find it necessary to compile music programs which demands recourse to a list of light music titles.  As matters stand I resort to publishers printed catalogues and my own memory but the ideal would be a computerised database to which I have added notes to classify the various titles by style such as sing along, dance, jazz, etc and to indicate speed, musical key, etc. I have from time to time contemplated compiling my own database using Excel or Access which would take a great deal of time I can ill afford. It would help enormously if a basic list of titles was already available from some source and if so, I would be most grateful for advice where it could be obtained.
D G Clarke, via email

I have an Excel spreadsheet listing about 1800 titles and keys, taken mainly from "Busker" songbooks. If this is of interest to D G Clarke I can e-mail it.

Roger Price,

Publishers' catalogues or other printed lists these can be scanned into his computer and using OCR software (I use TextBridge, which has a table import format) he can extract the data into formatted files. TextBridge has an option to save in Excel format and from there, with a little editing, he can then import the data into Access.

Another possible source is to save on-line catalogues and lists and convert these into data. My preferred method is to copy the required data from Internet Explorer by highlighting the tables or text and pressing Ctrl-C. Then, in Word, open a new blank document and use Edit/Paste Special, selecting the "Formatted Text (RTF)" option. This clears out all the HTML
code and should leave the text either in a Word Table or as plain text. The former can then be imported into Excel for further editing. The latter may take a bit more work. (I have Word 2000 so I am not sure if this paste option is available in earlier versions.)
Gerry Newnham,

I have used and been very pleased with Masterfile on Amstrad 9512.I am in early stages of converting to MF PC with Windows 98.Campbell Systems is available at  63 Traps Hill Loughton Essex IG10 1TD www.campbell-systems.co.uk

tel 0208 502 3334 fax 0208 532 0446

John Beaumont,

HERALDRY

Is there a software program available for designing heraldic coats of arms?  The only one I've seen was a sub-program of a family history package and had a very limited library of creatures etc.  I would appreciate one that spoke the rather esoteric language of heraldry too!

Steve Wilson, via email

May I suggest a visit to www.digiserve.com/heraldry where among others he will find reference to 'Blazons! & Blazon' software produced originally by Pandect Services. I originally used these some years ago but they now seem to have upgraded versions available.

Syd Gronow,

100 CLUB

Can you tell me if you know of any software, which is available to run a '100 Club'?  We need to administer the members etc. and generate the winning numbers.

Judith Stodel, via email

I have developed a program for a charity to undertake the entire management of such a Club (in fact, a number of "200 Clubs"). It is written in Foxbase (a DOS-based database system) but this runs perfectly well in a DOS window in all versions of Windows in which I've tried it (95, 98 and ME - a similar program also works in NT4).

The program handles multiple Clubs (there is a limit of 26 since each is referred to by a letter of the alphabet, although this could be changed in the very unlikely event of needing more). Essentially, it keeps a database of all members, maintains a ledger and produces standard letters (for members for each draw plus a renewal letter at the end of the year). When the draw takes place (four times a year), a letter is produced for all members informing them whether they have won a prize and giving a list of all prizewinners (partial addresses only).  It also produces a list in a  second format (intended for printing in the charity's magazine)  - at present, this listing consists of the prize values and the membership numbers).
Dr Adrian V Stokes OBE,

CAN YOU HELP?

One of my retirement hobbies is researching aspects of local history. Is there a source on the web for annual calendars for the Julian Calendar in use before 1752 to help me put a day of the week to the dates of events or software to create such calendars. There are ways of manually working out the days to match dates but mistakes are easily made.

Barry Redfern, via email

Is there a software program, which automatically calculates CGT on shares, some of which were purchased some 5 -6 years ago.

Douglas Forbes, via email

I would like to archive our Butterfly Conservation branch newsletters etc. for posterity. They are produced on MS Word or MS Publisher and contain pictures and diagrams as well as text. The original format is unsatisfactory as files are inaccessible from anything but a PC with Publisher/Word and even a change of printer destroys the format. I have tried printing Encapsulated Postscript files but have been unable to read them on several low-cost image processing systems such as Adobe 4.01 LE (limited edition). Does anybody have a low cost answer to this one apart from the time-consuming and data-corrupting solution of reading the pages into a flat-bed scanner? With writeable CD-ROMS, file size is not too much of a problem.
Jim Chance, via email