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Using a text editor, you can write programs from scratch by typing each command, line after line. That’s how most programmers used to write programs: the hard way. With dBASE Plus, you use design tools to generate the program code for you. The most painstaking requirement of traditional user-interface programming—guessing how fields and menus will appear after positioning them with coordinates—is obsolete. You place objects on a form exactly where you want them, and let dBASE Plus figure out the coordinates. That’s visual programming.

But there’s more to visual programming than just laying out forms. The objects you place on your forms have a built-in ability to respond to a user’s actions. A pushbutton automatically recognizes a mouse click. A form "knows" when the user moves or resizes it. You don’t need to figure out what the user does and how it happens. dBASE Plus handles that. You just tell the objects how to respond to these events by assigning procedures that will execute when the events occur.

The results of programming visually are applications that are easy to create and easy to use. They’re easy to use because they’re event-driven.