I've just started cataloguing my 11 or 12,000 rolls here, only a few
hundred of which are Ampico rolls.  I enter using a Microwriter AgendA,
a palm-top organizer with an ingenious five-fingered keyboard, which
separates the rolls by line and the fields by column number.  A plain
old DOS ASCII file is produced which can be copied into a PC and viewed
with a large-file viewer like GTV, which can whizz through 11,000 lines
in a flash and copy blocks for export elsewhere.

If I want to see what Ampico rolls of what age I have, I first sort
the file using DOS SORT at the roll-make field, putting all my Ampicos
in one place.  Then export that block to another file (merely to
simplify the process) and sort again by roll number from the front.
Bingo.  I even have batch files which will do this automatically.

No shortened numbers are needed.  Why should they be needed in more
complex systems ?

Dan Wilson, London