The following is an email I just received from one of my co-workers, does anyone from Revelation have any comments?

I spent a few hours experimenting with Banded Reporter today. I've documented some of my miscellaneous thoughts below:

• I can't seem to get any kind of help to open, either by pressing F1, or by clicking Help, Help. The documentation distributed in the Whats_New_8.chm is extremely limited

• It is difficult to select fields, particularly when there are as many fields as we have in our tables. If use select, need to provide coordinates. If try to drag on, you must type in the field name to find because "arrowing" through many fields with so small a control is very time consuming.

• When try to save the first time, I get a screwy message that the table is not locked.

• When drag window bigger, it changes the positioning of items on the view, e.g. the field properties disappear, as do the report footer and page footer and the select box moves above the grid . I played around more and their appears to be no way to open up the report so that you can use a full page (certainly not a page in landscape) without permanently messing up the way the report controls work.

• Shift click to select multiple fields (to format, align, etc.) only appears to select two fields - this is unworkable.

• I can't figure out how to format a field - e.g. format a date as mm/dd/yy

• I added a grouping band, and now I see no way to remove it.

• There appears to be no way to add a field for display purposes to the grouping band.

• One nice feature is that you can do a print preview and resize and reposition fields while you look at the display.

• For some reason, the first time I do a print preview, it opens my dial up connection.

• I see no way to create calculated fields.

• I see no way to suppress detail

• I see no way to total columns.

• I found it very difficult to place column headings in the appropriate positions over data.

I recommend that you spend a little bit of time with the product to confirm my impressions. I don't plan on spending any more time with it until I hear back from you.

My overall impression is that this product just won't cut it for us. Our users despise Reporter, with all its bugs and its tendency to corrupt their work. As desperate as we are to get rid of Reporter, I can't recommend Banded Reporter to our users. It is just too limited in terms of functionality and hard to use.

I have posted before some of the same problems u faced. Some I faced is fixed like the bold and underline missing, will be included in the comming next release. Others i am not sure, i hope they have fixed it. I was dissapointed in this banded report cause i was thinking of using it for all my report printing since they said its as good as the crystal report.

Jim,

Thanks for the feedback. I will add this to the current list of enhancements/fixes necessary for the Banded Report Writer.

Sean

Could you give him some kind of answer to each of his bullet points?

Telling him that his comments have been added to an enhancement list is not very reassuring.

Jim-

As I am out of the office this week on holiday, I would presume the staff is collecting items like this for my review upon my return. We'll respond in more detail next week. Sorry for the delay.

Mike Ruane

Mike,

No problem, enjoy your vacation.

Jim-

Answers

1. The BRW help is lacking. At this point, only the QuickStart has any real documentation. This will be rectified by the 8.0.x (where x ] 1) release. Probably 8.0.2.

2. Regarding the selecting of fields, I'm not sure what is being described here. You can do multiple field selects as of 8.0.1 with click and shift-click, so I don't know if that helps.

3. The save message appears to be fixed for the 8.0.1 release.

4. We can't duplicate the error described here- fields moving when with BRW child is resized. We may have fixed it in the 8.0.1 release.

5. As of release 8.0.1, more than two fields can be selected with either the shift-click, or click and draw. This had been in the 8.0 release; I was suprised when I did a demo at the UK seminar a few weeks ago and it didn't work.

6. Overwriting of the a field's OCONV or FMT has been added for the 8.0.1 release.

7. Group Bands can be removed as of the 8.0.1 release.

8. At this time fields can be added to the group bands, but not by dragging them from the field list, but rather by using the Add Label and Add Field buttons in the upper-right hand side of the BRW Frame.

9. We like the print preview feature as well.

10. We cannot duplicate the print preview trying to open a dialup connection.

11. At this time there is no way to create calculated fields. This is not so much a technical issue as it is a licensing one; this feature will be available in a 8.0.x release, where x ] 1.

12. There is no way to suppress detail at this time. It may or may not be added in the future.

13. There is no way to total a column at this time. This will be added in the 8.0.2 release.

14. It should be easy to align the columns and column headings by using the grid settings and snapping to the grid. The alignment tools will not handle aligning controls inside of more than one grid area at this time.

As I said at the Roadshows in 2006, and at the User's Conference in January if this year, the BRW is still in development. All additional feature that we add to the tool in the feature will be backward compatible and will not break any of the functionality of the reports that are created now. We realize that the tool is not fully featured yet- this is mote of a sandbox release. What it does it should do well, but it does not do enough to be as robust as the old Reporter.exe was. We will continue to improve and add to the tool, base dupon our and our customers' needs.

Thanks for the feedback-

Mike Ruane

Mike,

Thank you for the feedback. I will pass this onto my co-worker.

Mike,

Again, thanks for your comments. Based on what you have said, I think we will wait till 8.0.1 to revisit a number of the problems Jim listed in his post.

I would like to comment on the importance of three if the items you responded about: calculated columns, supressing detail and totaling a column. I have done a LOT of work with Reporter. These three things are among the most important and useful features in Reporter. I can't see how Reporter can be adequately replaced without them. I hope you are able to find a way to expedite their inclusion in the Banded Report Writer.

Thanks,

Andy Gilman

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