Downloading Search Results from CASSIS

What you need to know before you begin

All CASSIS Databases are able to save results to a file on a diskette instead of printing them. To make use of this feature, you will need three things:

A Formatted Floppy Disk.
Your disk must already be formatted. Formatted disks are available for purchase at the HUB Bookstore across the street.
The cassis terminal only accepts only 3.5 inch discs.
Access to a PC (at home, work, or at a computer lab).
A Little Practice
The results on your floppy disk can be printed at your computer, loaded into any word processor and edited, or even loaded into a database or spreadsheet. We will be happy to give as much help as possible, but the best directions for doing all of this are in the documentation for your software.

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Saving Results to a Disk -- Step-by-Step Instructions

Put your formatted disk in the diskette drive.

Press F4 to bring up the "Actions" menu and use the arrow down key to highlight the "Print..." line and press Enter. A shortcut to this is holding down the ALT key while pressing the E key.

The next screen has four important pieces of information you should fill in/look at before starting the download. You can change any of these options by using the arrow keys to highlight the line you wish to change. Pressing the SPACE bar will then bring up a menu of choices. Using the arrow keys highlight your choice, then press ENTER to make the selection.

Make sure the Document Format says "Brief Record".

Make sure the Range is correct

Make sure you enter a valid DOS filename. (You do not need to specify a drive, the default is the a:\ drive)
Make sure you select an "Output Format"
The output format you should choose depends on what software you will use to work with the search results. ASCII is a generic text format that can be used with any word processor. Comma Delimited and dBASE III+ are common database formats, and Lotus is a common spreadsheet format. If you are not using a database or spreadsheet program to work with your results, or if you are not familiar with how they import these data formats, you should probably use ASCII.

If everything is okay, press the Enter key.

You will then get an on screen message while the text is printing which looks like the following. You will be unable to continue your search until the printer is done printing.

You should now see the red light on the floppy drive come on. A window onscreen will tell you how many citations have been saved. (Even though the message onscreen says Printing Text, the results are going to the floppy disk.)

Once all your search results have been saved, wait for the red light on the floppy drive to go out and then remove your disk.
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Questions or comments?
e-mail the Engineering Library: englib@u.washington.edu
Last modified: Wednesday December 19 2001