exporting reports

[audrey]

Dear Gary, As you can see, by my many e-mails (and phone calls) there are no plans to correct this. Try Version 8 or 8.5. It is very easy to export from those versions. I think PowerChurch did not realize how many people export reports., and do not have the time to reformat.

[Keats]

I can deal with changing wording in the text boxes to change reports. However, it's a royal pain when you delete a line and need to move everything else on the page up to eliminate a blank line or vice versa when you want to insert a line.

I haven't been able to insert new page breaks and delete old ones. For example, on our Balance Sheet the heading for the Assets is at the bottom of the first page and the sub-headings and detail is on the next page. I would like to have the main heading on the same page with the sub-headings and the detail. Has anyone conquered this yet? Could Seagate offer any assistance to those of us struggling with their software "enhancements?"

[Mike_P]

Thanks Jeff,

Your reply was thorough and very informative and addresses exactly what I suspected. This is unfortunate, as I'm sure many PC+ customers, like us, currently cannot afford to upgrade our machines to XP and every new software something that comes along. It appears that this 3rd party reporting module, Crystal Reports, is more finicky with the OS and requires more resources than does PC+.

In the meantime, I'll continue to try to work around the issues I have. I wish at least that the export to .RTF was more like the old Word format. That worked fine for me. Not sure if trying to learn custom reports will help anything.

In the future, it would be helpful to publish recommended system requirements for CR separately from those of PC+. Also, it should be noted that CR has been upgraded with new releases. Then we will have better information on which to base an upgrade decision.

This has been a disappointing upgrade for us, and I'm not sure if the trouble CR has caused has been offset by the improved feature set in PC+9.

Mike P.

[NeilZ]

Re: Mike's comment: When I use Word2000 to open a .DOC file exported from Crystal Reports in PC+9, each item on the report in Word is in its own “frame.” This creates a very, very unfriendly document to edit. Frames were designed to create web pages, not word processor documents.

I am a new user and our church is willing to give PowerChurch a try, but I am finding it very difficult to export into Word and make a report look like I want it to look. I am finding this to be a major shortcoming of this product; are there any plans to fix this?

Gary

Gary,

please note Jeff's response above ... there's not much that they can do to fix this. Its a 'feature' of Crystal Reports, and is out of their hands.

For those that are not programmers, Crystal Reports (orignallly Seagate Crystal Reports) is a 'third-party' software package that is used by many developers for their reporting requirements in their software.

It provides capablities that would normally take hundreds (thousands??) of hours for a developer to recreate, and would probably price the software out of the reach of many churches. The integration is seamless, as they can compile in calls to the external modules of Crystal Reports in much the same way they call the operating system services.

However, using a third-party set of modules also means that you have to abide by their licensing rules, one of which is that for support, you have to have the latest version. As it is, PC+ uses Crystal Reports v.9 .. which is still supported, and can run under Win9x/ME/2K/XP, but Business Objects is now touting version 11 !!

As Jeff mentioned, they have fixed the exporting in a later version of Crystal Reports, but that version requires Windows 2000 or WinXP. That would eliminate many of the churches that currently use PC+, including mine, as we have three machines that are still running Win98, and could not handle an operating system upgrade.

There is a trade off ... more functionality in membership, accounting, contributions for the money (more bang for the buck), but less functionaity in exporting reports.

I have to admit, my treasurer and CPA were thrilled with the changes they saw in Version 9.0. The financial secretary is getting setup to use the Email contributions functionality, and my Clerk of Session loves the 'Add Family Wizard'.

Speaking for myself, the staff at PC+ have been very, VERY responsive to our suggestions, fix requests and questions in areas they have full control over. I've not seen such support coming from other commerical packages, unless one had a service agreement costing hundreds a year.

As you can tell ... we've been very satisfied with PC+ since version 7.

[gary]

Neil & Jeff, Thank you for taking the time and effort to explain the situation to me. I really appreciate that you are listening to us, and I understand that you have to make some trade-offs in terms of costs, user specs, etc. Our church is fortunately running on XP (small church with only a couple of PC's) -- does that mean that I can have access to the improved exporter? Given how much I am struggling to format my exported reports, I would seriously consider paying for the later version of Crystal Reports if it works better than what I have now. Is this possible? It would be great for those of us that have Win 2000 or XP to have some additional options, even if we have to pay for them.

If not, how feasible is it for me to go back to Version 8.5?

Thanks, Gary

[audrey]

Dear whoever, Considering all the trouble we are having , I would be interested is this "improved exporter", also. We are running 2000. I am told that you can go back to 8.5, but you would have to re-input all the information that you have added since your upgrade. In our case, that would be since December, and time wise, with 3 of us on different modules, not feasible.

[Jeff]

We wouldn't be able to integrate Crystal Reports 11 for just a few users while the rest remained on CR9.

Gary since you mentioned you were willing to spend a little bit of money for a work around this might work for you. I played around this morning with a couple of PDF to Word converters. They convert the contents of a PDF file to a Word Document. What you would do in PowerChurch is save the report to PDF file and then use one of these programs to convert the PDF file to a Word document.

I did a google search for PDF Word Converter and found several programs that would do this. Most are in the $50 range and almost all had demos that you could download and try before you buy them. I would recommend doing this as some converted everything into textboxes in order to preserve formatting. Others would give you the option of how editable you wanted the output to be, the more editable the less formatting is saved. The best one I found in the hour I spent doing this was SolidPDF. I am not necessarily recommending this product as I have not spent enough time researching these types of programs. The only issue I had with this program was it converted some membership reports using columns. The result was still editable, but it might or might not work for you. I can only suggest you give it a try.

[gary]

Jeff, thank you for the lead on PDF Word converters -- I did not know about this possibility and will definitely investigate it. I understand that these converters are not part of the PowerChurch package and are therefore not endorsed by PowerChurch.

For others who are interested, I plan to explore a few of these possibilities over the coming week. I will let you know.

Thanks again for taking the time and effort to try to help.

Gary

[audrey]

Jeff, thank you so much for the info on PDF Word converters. I have downloaded a trial copy to try for 2 weeks. So far, so good.

[gary]

Just a short note to let you know that I have investigated a number of exporters and decided to use Solid PDF at http://www.solidpdf.com/.

It is still a little bit of a pain to work with the exported documents but it is much easier than working with frames. The cost is around $50 for single user.

Thanks to the PowerChurch support staff for pointing this out to me.

Gary

[Ronz]

We almost did not upgrade to version 9 because of the reports problem. But we did. Now we have to deal with the problems. I tried to produce my first reports last night for our Finance Comittee meeting and got hit with the problems.

I see some problems that may be correctable using the current Crystal Reports system.

1. When I export accounting reports to an Excel file, it's trying to put too much on a page. The automatic page break comes a couple of rows before the hard page break. So I get a full page then a page with only two rows. Room should be allowed for headers if so desired.

2. I don't like the page breaks in the budget report. We just started budgeting some accounts in funds other than our General Fund 01. When we have one account budgeted in another fund, it gets printed on a page by itself. So we end up with a bunch of pages with just one account on them. I want them all on one page with appropriate headings. Or just mixed in all together in account number order. (that would be best for me)

3. With older versions, I have exported all of the reports that I need into Word format then used Word's master document feature to assemble them all into one report with page numbering and editing. With version 9, I can't edit much any more, but I can still do page numbering. When I create the master document, EVERY report in the master document has a wierd blank page after it. and I can't delete it. If the cause of that blank page was eliminated, that would help.

With all of the text boxes in the reports, scrolling up and down in the Word master document was frustratingly slow.

I'll try the PDF export trick. Maybe that will help.

It would help if we could just copy and paste from Power Church's screen reports.

It may help if there were a way to ADD a report to an already exported report as an option. Perhaps a PDF. One could assembe a number of PC's reports into one document.

Previously my goal in producing the reports was to keep the number of pages down and eliminate any unnecessary data. Can't do much of that now.

[lincolnda]

When we were on version 8.5, most of my report exports were to ascii text files for the type of items I wanted to edit. Now in version 9 the text file exports only sometimes come out the way I want, and a lot depends on the setting for characters per inch you find under File.Preferences.User setup options.reports. If a number higher up in the allowable range is picked(about 19-20), you find that items on the right half of the report are usually spaced too far to the right and wrap down to the next line, especially if there are many blank spaces before those text items on the original screen report, unless you pick a very small font or set up the page for landscape. If you lower the number in that characters per inch selection, the rightmost elements of the report move more and more to the left (each time you reduce the number), until you find a point where the line ends don't wrap down to the next line anymore, but large numbers in the data may become truncated, and you loose some of the msd's of the larger numbers. If you don't have large numbers to lose part of, there may be columns that get squeezed too close together at these lower character per inch settings if the original screen report had columns that were only one space apart. It is very hard to get a happy medium on the character per inch setting that works for different reports, without needing to change it to make the report you want to come out right.

To get around this I have discovered a way to export to a text file that almost produces the same result as version 8.5 text file exports did. It requires setting up a "Print to File" option in your choices of available printers that uses the "Generic, text only" print driver. If you have that already, you are all set. When you are ready to export the report, instead of picking "Export to File", select the "Print" button. Instead of your default printer, select the "Print to File" print driver. When the input box for file name pops up, I type \p\p.txt (I have a directory c:\p for this purpose, to minimise keystrokes). I also have a shortcut on the desktop for c:\p\p.txt, so once the file has been written, double clicking that shortcut opens it in my text editor. In most cases this produces a text export of the report closer to what 8.5 used to do than what version 9 does now.

[schwabl]

Neil: I have read your replies regarding the inability of Crystal Reports to export a file in editable text, and am baffled by your lack of concern for the users of PC+ 9.0. If I were in your position, I would be working with another report program to give my customers the flexibility that they want. Crystal cannot be the only report generator that works with FoxPro 9.0! Not all of your program's users have the knowlege, or the time, to work with "text boxes". How about an attitude of "customer service" on your side, and get us some help, if even from your own programmers.

Sincerely,
Larry Schwab
Frontier UMC

[Zaphod]

Neil: I have read your replies regarding the inability of Crystal Reports to export a file in editable text, and am baffled by your lack of concern for the users of PC+ 9.0. If I were in your position, I would be working with another report program to give my customers the flexibility that they want. Crystal cannot be the only report generator that works with FoxPro 9.0! Not all of your program's users have the knowlege, or the time, to work with "text boxes". How about an attitude of "customer service" on your side, and get us some help, if even from your own programmers.

Larry,

Actually, you are in Neil's position. Neil is just a regular PowerChurch user who has taken it upon himself to be very helpful by sharing his technical expertise. He's not a PowerChurch employee, though we appreciate his activity on the board because he goes above and beyond the call of duty to offer his assistance on a variety of issues. It's an understandable mistake on your part to assume that, since his answers are very thorough and knowledgeable.

Also, the discussion in this thread is now moot as of the 6/1/2005 maintenance release, since most of these issues were addressed in that update.

Thanks.

[foxygramps]

When first using ver 9, our bookkeeper had some very nasty things to say about the report formats using the new version of Crystal Reports.
With the latest MR and a return to an earlier version of Crystal reports, he is smiling again, says the export problems are gone and in some ways better than they have ever been.
If you haven't installed the latest MR, you should do it immediately.