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The HALTAB™ Data Management System
- HALCO's HALTAB™ Data Management System is used to manage input, output and database functions by all of HALCO's software products. It includes the HalcoMenu™ program, which is the entry point for all programs and utilities, the HalcoEdit™ program, which facilitates data entry via MS Excel, and sets up a relational input database, and the HalcoMiner™ program, which downloads information from output databases into Excel, for standard or special-purpose reports. The HalcoMiner™ program is supplementary to standard database reporting software. HALTAB™ includes many other utilities, including one for merging Excel data files from various sources, and another for moving data between different types of files, and another for merging output database files to facilitate side-by-side reporting of results from different runs.
- As an option, input and output files can be transferred from desktop computers to and from Oracle, SQL Server or other databases located on central servers. For this system, HALCO has developed software to keep track of changes made to input data files. Each version of a data file that has been used can be recovered, as well as when each change was made, and by whom.
HalcoMenu™
- This program is the entry point for most HALCO programs and utilities. Many of these require several input files, and produce output files which may in turn become input files for other programs, and also for MS Excel and Access, and other database programs. These programs may also be called from HalcoMenu™.
- The user may set up various projects under HalcoMenu™, and specify the programs that may be called under each project. The names of the programs and input and output files are displayed in a Windows Explorer-type tree structure. Using the HalcoMenu™ program simplifies what can be a complex data-management task.
HalcoEdit™
- Most of the user-supplied inputs to HALCO-developed programs may be through MS Excel, which with HalcoEdit™ is used, in effect, as a relational database. Each worksheet within an Excel workbook may contain a database table, which must have the correct relationships with data in other tables. Unlike a true database program such as MS Access, Excel does not provide automatic relational checking. However Excel has many advantages over a true database that make it a very desirable vehicle for data input. The HalcoEdit™ program provides a "shell" around Excel, which displays all the tables in the workbook in an Explorer-type tree structure, and does relational database-type checking. Error fields are highlighted in red, for correction by the user. This is different from a conventional database procedure, which would not allow this type of error to be entered in the first place. This latter can be very inconvenient to the user, who may wish to copy and paste data, edit it in Excel, and correct it afterwards.
- HalcoEdit™ has many features that allow various combinations of key fields to be generated, deleted or changed, automatically. It also facilitates the display of context-sensitive Help information.
HalcoMiner™
- Many HALCO-written programs write their results in database format to MS Access or Excel, or other databases.
- If written to Excel, HalcoEdit™ can be used to view the results and generate reports.
- For large files, a true database, such as MS Access, is better, and allows standard reporting tools to be used.
- For analytical work and special-purpose reports, HALCO has developed the HalcoMiner™ program which can extract data from MS Access or other widely-used databases. HalcoMiner™, as opposed to generic tools, is fully aware of the specifics the HALCO database structure. It allows the user to extract data from tables and queries, and, with a minimum of effort, to sort results into their natural order, as opposed to alphabetic order, and to group, total, average, and cross-tabulate as required. The results of these manipulations may be exported to Excel, or viewed inside HalcoMiner™.
- HalcoMiner™ makes it easy for someone proficient in Excel, but with limited database skills, to use queries and to manipulate and report on results that are generated.