WorldTime

WorldTime Subset finds city by its area code

[Based on a tip by David Shier.]

It's easy to find the city telephone prefix in WorldTime. Say you want to know the area code for Chicago. Open WorldTime and start typing Chicago. The cursor will jump down to the Chicago, IL entry. Press (ENTER) a couple of times and Chicago's data card is displayed, with the City Prefix indicated in the middle of the second line.

Sometimes it's necessary to work in the opposite direction. For example, let's say you find a scrap of paper with the name and phone number of a client written on it. You might want to know what city the person lives in so you can figure out time zones and when it's best to call. Here's how to create a Subset in WorldTime to make that easy.

  1. 1. Open WorldTime and press (F6).

  2. 2. Press (F2) to define a new Subset.

  3. 3. Press (F10), give your new Subset a name (call it City Codes), and press (F10) again.

  4. 4. With City Codes highlighted in the View Subset dialog box, press (F10) again.

  5. 5. Press (MENU) View Arrange Columns.

  6. 6. Press (F2) to add a column, highlight City Prefix in the Columns list and press (F10).

  7. 7. With the cursor on the new column, press (F7) to move it to the left, to the first column in the display. Then press (F10) to save that change in position.

  8. 8. Press (MENU) View Sort.

  9. 9. Change the 1st sort field to City Prefix and the 2nd sort field to City. Press (F10) when you're finished.

[Note points 5 and 8. The Columns and Sort functions are accessed by F-keys in most of the database-related applications on the 100/200LX. However, they can only be accessed by the MENU key in WorldTime.]

Now all you have to do is start typing the prefix of a phone number and the cursor will jump down to the city associated with it. Note that with U.S. phone numbers, the number 1 and a blank space precede the city prefix. So if you had phone number with 312 as its prefix, you would start typing 1 312 and the cursor will jump down to the city it's associated with -- Chicago.

The changes you've made to the view and sort order of the main screen are associated with the City Prefix Subset only and will not appear in the All Cities, or any other Subset you have created. Whenever you want to look up a city by its phone number, select the City Prefix Subset and you're in business.