I am ready to translate my Q&A databases to Sesame. What should I do first and where are my Q&A files?

Sesame is not a new version of Q&A, it is a new program that can read and translate Q&A.

The first thing to do is to carefully read the Q&A Database Translation Guide supplied with Sesame. In summary, you will want to clean up your database structure, clean up your data, legalize your field names, and check your programming. While Sesame will translate most of your Q&A databases, you must make sure that they are both healthy and ready for translation.

If a Q&A database has internal damage - records disappear, error messages occur, problems with finding records - it will probably not translate correctly. The damage must be repaired first. If your data is not what Sesame expects - text in date or yes/no fields, etc. - Sesame will reject it on translation. If your field names contain illegal characters like *, /, -, @, etc. - Sesame will not translate them successfully. There are also some programming issues to be addressed in order to take care of the differences between Sesame and Q&A.

The best way to fix any of these problems is to do it in Q&A before attempting translation. The Guide covers all of this and more.