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From: lars@spectrum.CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Dollars & Sense 4.x Archives - What good are they ?
Message-ID: <1991Jan3.182402.9150@spectrum.CMC.COM>
Date: 3 Jan 91 18:24:02 GMT
References: <1991Jan2.203320.29488@spectrum.CMC.COM> <44440@mips.mips.COM>
Organization: Rockwell CMC
Lines: 43

In article <1991Jan2.203320.29488@spectrum.CMC.COM>, I (Lars Poulsen)
	[lars@spectrum.cmc.com] that I had never successfully made use
	of the "archive" file that Dollars and Sense produces when you
	close out an old accounting year.

In article <44440@mips.mips.COM> libby@mips.com (Jeff Libby) writes:
>The archive file seems to just be a Dollars and Sense data file.
>So rather than trying to unarchive the archive file, just open the
>archive directly (close the current data file first, if it's already
>open).  You'll see a warning not to change anything in the archive,
>after which you can do anything to the archive that you can do to
>your active data file.  This includes generating and exporting reports.

- and he's right.
Works just like I would have wanted it to. So why did I have problems ? 
It turns out there are three problems.

(1) In the documentation, Monogram uses the term "archive" for the
    "old year" file; this is the same term that they use for a file of
    raw transactions that has been extracted from the database in order
    to speed up daily operations. And such an archive can indeed only be
    used by "unarchiving" it back into the main file. So I was primed to
    expect to have to do that.
(2) When you open the "old year" file, D&S puts up a modal dialog with a
    message beginning with the word "Sorry", giving you a clear cue that 
    what you just tried to do has failed. Since there is only one button
    on the dialog, labeled "OK", I would have discovered that it was OK,
    except for the third problem:
(3) I have been keeping my old year files on locked floppies. When
    opening the "old year" file, it appears that D&S tries to open a
    workfile on the same volume as the "old year" file. So I get a
    modaldialog with an error message that says "Unable to open file",
    again with only an "OK" button. And when dismissing THAT, yet
    another modal dialog reporting an IO error -39 appears ...

But armed with the above information, I persisted, and just kept
dismissing error dialogs, and .... it came up !!

Thanks for the helpful information. I just love the net.
(And Monogram should fix this !!!)
-- 
/ Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer
  CMC Rockwell  lars@CMC.COM