Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!hartquis
From: hartquis@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (E. Eugene Hartquist)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Reports (tm) for HyperCard
Message-ID: <4536@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 22 Apr 88 18:18:12 GMT
Reply-To: hartquis@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (E. Eugene Hartquist)
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 89



This is one persons opinion of Activision's Reports (tm) 
(long)

My application is a directory stack (name, title, company, 
address, phone, e-mail address, etc) with the ability to 
categorize entries (personal, business, club member, Chrismas 
Card, etc.)  It has facilities for producing mailing labels, 
mail merge files and directory listings.  The problems come 
in producing a nicely formatted directory.

I tried using a mail merge file in much the same way as the 
XREF stack does it, but MS Word is very fragile here and it 
breaks when I try to list more than 100 or so addresses.  It 
is also very good at hiding problems when you try to debug a 
document/mail merge file combination.  You often get some 
meaningless message and no information about where in your 
merge to look for the problem.  (Take note Mr. Gates, here is 
an excellent area to target for improving Word.)

Reports sounded like the best thing since slice bread for 
this application.  Nope.  The problems:

1) Reports has a bug that crashes your machine with an ID=5 
error if you try to use the select feature.  That's not so 
bad.  There is a fix on Activision's BBS (and other places -- 
call them).  I tried for two days to call into their BBS.  No 
answer, so the bug hasn't been fixed in my copy.

2) You can put information from card fields into little boxes 
in your report, each box is able to handle one font.  
Hmmm...that is a problem if you are trying to put together 
first name, last name, and professional title, with the last 
name in bold, so that it looks like something.  The solution 
is to write a script -on DetailSection- to format the name 
and the put it into one box, forgetting about the fancy bold 
stuff.  Carry this to the extreme, where you format whole 
addresses using a script and put the whole thing into one 
box.  Now the smallest address take up as much room on the 
page as the biggest one.  I began to wonder, where is the 
gain in using Reports.

3) Along the same lines,  Report provides these nice rulers 
to aligning things -- but there are no little reference lines 
in the ruler to tell you where you are.  You just have to 
eyeball it.  And, I never did figure out what the default 
margins were or how to measure from the edge of the paper to 
where I wanted something.  You simple fiddle with things and 
print again until you have something that looks presentable. 
The preview feature isn't always helpful.

4) To use Reports you MUST put a ReportCard into your stack.  
Do you have any idea the havoc this causes in an otherwise 
smoothly functioning stack?  Suppose you land on the 
ReportCard and ask for information from a field that isn't 
there?  Also, it subverts things that you set up in your 
stack.  E.g.  the idle handler I used failed, I set UserLevel 
to 2,  it set it to 5, etc.  When I got the stack sort of 
functional again, scripts began to looked like haywire (a 
reference to the method of programming computers with a plug 
board).  I began with the ReportCard at the back of my stack 
(I wanted it out of the way until it was needed.)  When the 
stack is sorted the ReportCard works its way toward the front 
of the stack and finally becomes the second card in the 
stack, which is not where I wanted it.  Now, Reports began to 
look like more effort than its worth.

5) Trying to move my stack from a Mac II to a Mac Plus proved 
to be the final frustration.  I wanted to find out how you 
move a stack that uses reports.  Well, I could not get it to 
work without or with Reports installed on the Mac Plus. 
(Okay, you don't necessarily want to move your stack to 
another machine anyway because it will cost some hundreds of 
dollars, roughly the cost of 10 copies of Reports to 
distribute a stack as shareware with the Reports function in 
it.  I checked.)

If you want a RIGIDLY formated report, perhaps with graphics, 
you can tolerate a foreign card in your pristine stack, you 
have lots of patients with getting little boxes aligned 
correctly and you have no plans to share your stack (or you 
plan to sell it at a good price) then Report is for you. 
(And, you can have it.)

Least you think I am a grinch let me tell you about this 
delightful little DA called Word Finder.  The posing will be 
in comp.sys.mac.

-- Gene