Impact version 3.74 released

Hot on the heels of version 3.73, released at the London Show, comes version 3.74 of Impact our relational database software for RISC OS. This fixes a few bugs with 3.73 and all users are encouraged to upgrade. There is a small charge for the upgrade from versions prior to 3.73.

The main new feature of 3.73 is that Impact can now interact with RiscOSM and provide records from databases to be plotted on RiscOSM maps, providing the record card includes the latitude and longitude of a location relating to the record. See the new chapter 20 in the manual for more details.

We have also done major work improving the search tools:

• A wider variety of field types may be searched together.
• “Partial match” has been renamed to Phrase search and can be used with all field types. It will test equality for numbers and for flag, option menu and browser fields will match any part of the defined values for those fields.
• Phrase search has to match a single field out of those being searched.
• New “All keywords” and “Any keywords” tests allow you to search for a number of words across several fields, and will match if some appear in one field and others in another field.
• Searching for dates now allows less-specific terms to be used: if your date field contains a full date like 1 October 2024 then you can find it using an “Equal to” search for “Oct 2024” or “2024”.
• Searching a numeric field for a term consisting of letters will no longer match zero. Searching a menu, option, flag or browser field for invalid values will no longer match any records either. Similarly for date fields.
• The search and replace boxes are wider, so that the boxes for range searches are a more sensible size. (This applies to Filter editing too.)

A free upgrade of RiscOSM to complement the Impact upgrade is available from our web site.