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TranCens

TranCens is a program written and designed to ease the task of indexing or transcribing the census. It is offered as Shareware and runs under Windows98, Windows NT4 & Windows XP. It comes as a complete package and no other software such as a database is required. A primary design aim is to make it very easy use, so that users only have to concentrate on the census itself, rather than using the computer.

This is a shareware program, which you can download and try out for free, but if you want to continue using it you will need to register. Details are provided in the instruction manual provided.

Downloading

The latest complete version (base release) of TranCens is 2.14 and it is available as a self extracting binary file. Just run this program to install TranCens.

An intruction manual is provided in the Doc sub directory in pdf format. You will find it once you have installed TranCens. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader version 3 (or later) to read this and you are likely to have it already installed on your machine. If not you can download a copy from Adobe.

Updates

As fixes and enhancements are produced, refreshes of the program itself, and documentation will be provided here. If you have not already installed a base release, you must do that first as only part of the software required is only installed with the base release. Updates are normally provided in a zip file to reduce the download time. To perform the update, rename you existing TranCens.exe program to something meaningful (as a backup), download the zip file, and extract the new version of TranCens.exe which must be placed in the same directory as the previous version.

Zip files have been used for a very long time for distributing software, and your system will probably already have a program on it for managing zip files. If not there are a number freely available, and these frequently appear on the CDs given away with computer magazines. If you want a web link to one such program, then try WinZip, or Pkzip.

The current updates available are as follows. If you are installing TranCens for the first time, you MUST install a base release first before installing the update. If the base release version is the same as the latest update you do not of course need to install the update.:

A list of the enhancements made to versions 2.06 onwards is available.

Instruction manual

The manual giving all the details about how to use the program is included in the base distribution. But you may also download it directly and browse it, if you want to know more about the program before you install it. The instruction manual was last updated with the 2.14 release.

BDE

The TranCens package, consists of the program itself, the Borland Database Engine, and the documentation. The BDE may be used by other programs, and you may already it installed on your machine before installing TranCens. There is more than one version of the BDE available, and the setup program will not overwrite a more recent version, with version 3.0 which is included with TranCens.