An Early
Look at
VALDOCS 2.0  
While Valdocs 2.0 was still 
in testing at this writing
it’s clear that a bug—ridden 
prerelease version is a
vast improvement over 
earlier releases of Valdocs 
Part of what makes 2.0 
better is that it is a lot  
meatier than its predeces- 
sors. There are seven ap-
plications modules sup— 
plied on one floppy disk for 
the QX-16 (or three floppy 
disks for the QX-I0). The 
applications include a text 
editor, spreadsheet, electronic communications, ad-
dress book, business graphics, date book, and card
file. There’s also a nice little program called Matrix
that lets you design your own fonts. And two other
impressive Valdocs programs, Valdraw and Valpaint,
will be offered at additional cost. These optional pro-
grams, which work with a mouse, let you draw, zoom,
and paint pixel by pixel.
Rising Star, the company responsible for Valdocs,
says it tried to make each Valdocs 2.0 application as
good as anything else in its field. It was an impossi-
ble goal, and one that Rising Star didn’t attain.
However, the company did take a giant step toward

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creating a very good software package.
 But Valdocs 2.0 has one obvious flaw—a
lack of true integration. Although all of the
modules function within the same environ-
ment, you can’t move data freely from most
Valdocs modules to others. In Valdocs you
can draw a graph, but you can’t move it into
a text file. Nor, for that matter, can you
move numbers from the spreadsheet to a
text file. State-of-the—art integrated soft-
ware lets you do those things. (This level
of integration will exist in Valdocs 3.0, says
Rising Star.)
 What exists already—and of paramount
importance to Valdocs designer Chris
Rutkowski—is a complicated software pack-
age that is relatively easy to use. Rising
Star officials think Valdocs 2.0 is so easy to
use, in fact, that the company will issue the
program with only an abbreviated (about
60 pages) user’s guide, which one Rising
Star executive described as "something like
what you would get with a power saw."
For people who want more, a 400+ page reference
manual will be available on request. A rough draft of
that manual turned out to be a cookbook of Valdocs
commands and features.
While it is too early at this writing to pass final judg-
ment on Valdocs 2.0, several aspects of the program
deserve a closer look. Valdocs is designed to work with
the HASCI keyboard that comes with both the QX-10
and the QX-16. Special control keys work with the
system, the files, and the applications.
The Edit key, for example, takes you into the Valdocs
word processor, for which many of the other function

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keys are designed. There are keys to delete text back-
wards and forwards by character, word, or line, as well
as keys for Bold, Ital, Size (to change the type size), and
Style (superscript or subscript).
The major criticism of earlier versions of the Valdocs
editor was that it was slow. That remains an issue in
2.0. Although Rising Star has speeded up input (to a
potential 400 words per minute), it has not brought some
word-processing functions up to the speed one might
expect. If you want to go from the top to the bottom
of a Valdocs file, plan on taking about two seconds for
each page of text. Block moves are also cumbersome,
although they are significantly faster than earlier ver-
sions of Valdocs. Because the editor is menu driven,
moving a block of text takes a dozen keystrokes.
A key labeled Calc moves you into the Valdocs spread-
sheet, which can handle up to 702 columns and 999
rows. You can divide the screen into as many as four
windows for a better look at varied parts of a single
spreadsheet, and the screen will display either 80 or
128 columns as you prefer. The spreadsheet works with
virtual memory, meaning it uses disk storage rather
than RAM only, and there is a trade-off—potential size
versus speed. Rising Star claims its program is the
fastest virtual-memory spreadsheet in the world, which
may well be true. But the Valdocs spreadsheet is much
slower than RAM-based spreadsheets such as Visicalc.
The Mail key gives you an electronic address book and
various communications functions. This program comes
closest to state-of-the-art in Valdocs 2.0. The communica-
tions program interfaces with the address book, allow-
ing automatic dialing and log-on. In addition to standard
communications protocols, Mail supports batch trans-
missions. It can instantly convert Valdocs files to Amer-
ican National Standard Code for Information Inter-

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change (ASCII) for fast uploading. One wonderful fea-
ture is background auto-answer, which answers even
if the machine is running another program module,
alerting you to press the Mail key to respond to your
call.
The Draw key takes you into the business graphics
module, which allows you to create pie, bar, line, and
scientific charts. All but the pie chart support eight
different sets of data, creating overlaid graphs. All
charts can be scaled in size.
Through the Menu key, you can access the card-file-
like database. Each card can have 14 data fields of
up to 56 characters You can define both primary and
secondary sort fields, and an index function lets you
include the same card in several databases
The sheer size of 2.0 makes a hard disk a must if
the software is to be used in a business environment.
Otherwise, you have to swap floppy disks when you
want to move from some applications to others That
is annoying and confusing. A solution to that prob-
lem—proposed by Valdocs designer Rutkowski-is to
delete from your working-applications disk those
Valdocs modules that you don’t often use (including
help files as you no longer need them), refilling the
disk with only those modules you want. It is a
reasonable kludge, but it is not the ultimate solution.
Neither is Valdocs 2.0 the ultimate solution to
everybody’s software needs Chris Rutkowski and his
brethren at Rising Star have undertaken a huge proj-
ect. They have grand dreams, and they are closing
in on them step by step. But Valdocs is still imperfect.
It needs integration. It still needs a faster text editor:
And, although Rutkowski vehemently disagrees, it
probably needs a microprocessor more powerful than
the 8-bit Z80 give it the muscle to do the job right.

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