I opened a Panorama 6 database in Panorama X. I have used regularly that database and finally most of the functions and forms work. But when I add a field it spins and spins and spins and does not insert it before the field I clicked on. When I try to move a field, it spins and spins and spins, rather than readily moving in readily by the drag and drop like shown in the help file. I spent two hours trying to set it up last night. Using force quit. Eventually i got them in place, but it shouldn’t take that long. The database has nearly 1000 records and about 200 fields (to keep record of past bills and payments.
One thing that should speed things up when moving the field order is to select only one record so that the screen redraw is minimized. The little testing I did seems to prove this out. You could also see if hiding the fields that are out of range of the moves might also help. Hide After Current Field from the Field menu makes that pretty simple to do when hiding several fields to the right at one time.
200 fields is a very high number. Panorama X is definitely significantly slower than Panorama 6 when using databases with over 100 fields. Panorama X uses Apple’s NSTableView class to display the data sheet, this is Apple’s standard code for displaying a matrix of items, and is used for things like the Finder’s view “as List” option. Apple highly optimized this code so that it is incredibly fast even with hundreds of thousands of rows being displayed. Unfortunately, they did not optimize it for large number of columns, and adding and removing columns are especially slow when there are a lot of columns being displayed. The best bet is to reduce the number of fields being displayed, if possible by redesigning the database to use less fields (perhaps splitting it into multiple databases, which is usually a good idea when the field count gets too high anyway), or by hiding many of the fields, as Gary suggested.