DATACAL PLUS - NEW FEATURES - VERSION 3.0 -------------------------------------------------- ********************************************************************** * Redesign Of Database Pull Down Menu The Database Menu has been shortened to help simplify the appearance of this pull down. All of the previous features are still available but you must select option # 6 (Database Sub-Menu) to access them. ********************************************************************** * Width Of Company & Street Fields : The width of the Company & Street fields have been increased from 30 characters wide to 35. Only first thirty characters are displayed on the screen but if you continue typing past that limit the field will scroll to the left to accomdate the extra five characters. A flashing Plus "+" sign will appear just to the right of the field letting you know that there is information that you can not see. This will also occur in the State field. If you have need to view the hidden characters, press EDIT, go to the field and use your right arrow to pan over. Because the Company field is an important one that helps create the link between various files, changes were also made to the following Databases. Customer.dbf, Invoice.dbf, Payment.dbf, Comments.dbf This requires that this version of Datacal be used ONLY with the proper file structures. If you have a succesful conversion, this will be done for you. ********************************************************************** * Telephone Extension Field Added A telephone extension field has been added to the Customer database file. It is a four character (9999) wide field that can accept both numbers and letters. The extension does not effect telephone dialing in any way. It has been added as a convenience to our users. If you have need for extension longer than four characters, use one of your many user definable fields. ********************************************************************** * Adding New Customer You can now ADD a new customer while you are in the EDIT Customer Mode. This means you no longer have to leave EDIT to enter a new client. A side benifit to this is that you can also CARRY OVER information from a previous customer onto the newly created record. For Example: You have multiple Contacts at XYZ Company and you want to ADD a new one for the same company. First FIND XYZ Company and have it displayed on your screen. Select the ADD option at bottom of screen. The program will ask if you want to CARRY OVER Displayed information. If you say (Y)ES, the Company Name, Address Phone & Code will be copied to the new record. The First and Lastname is left intentionally blank since Datacal will not allow a duplicate record to exist. A duplicate record is one in which the Company Name plus Last Name exactly matches another record in your file. Another benifit to ADDing customers from the EDIT screen is that sometimes you may want to check if they already exist in your files. You first try to find them and if they are not found, just press 'A' and ADD the new record. ********************************************************************** * Escape Key Throughout For the most part, your ESCape key will emulate the 'X' key when sitting at any of the command line prompts. Many programs use ESCape to BACK OUT OF parts of the program to a higher level and has been added here for compatiblity sake. ********************************************************************** * Yes/No vs. True/False All Yes/No questions expect to have a 'Y' or an 'N' typed in for their response. Previous versions would say (T/F) for True/False. Even though our users have quickly adapted to the T/F senario, we felt it time to make this change for the peace of mind of ever growing number of users. ********************************************************************** * Criteria Selection Criteria Selection or Filtering has been completely revamped. It marks what may be the most significant change to version 3.0 . Whenever you request to print a report or send a form letter etc. to a group of people you'll be presented will the new Criteria Selection procedure. Datacal field names will appear in a scrollable window. You'll scroll to the desired field and press Enter. Next a window will appear to allow you to select how you want this field to be matched up with info you will type later (ie. Equal To , Greater Than etc.). Once you select let's say 'Equal To' you'll be able to enter what you want the search to be equal to ( ie. Los Angeles). If you want to add new conditions to the same search you can choose 'AND' or 'OR' and repeat the cycle when that window appears. It will make a lot more sense when you actually try it on your own. A big plus in this version is that you may now store a particular search filter for later use. You'll love doing this. Previous versions required a criteria selection sequence each time you wanted a report, now you can print the report by selecting a saved filter that you made weeks ago. Try it, you'll see what we mean. Just make sure you read the screen carefully. Up to 99 filters may be saved. ********************************************************************** * Locate You can now (L)ocate a customer while at the Customer Input Screen by almost any imaginable criteria. Previously you could only find a client by one of seven different ways: Company, Code, Lastname, ID Number, Zipcode, Follow-Up Date, Salesman The above fields used an Index to Find the records by jumping right to it quickly. Locate is simular but not quite as fast. The advantage of it is that you can use ANY field to create your search, even a phone number. It uses the same criteria selection method as mentioned above. It took a lot of work to give you this, PLEASE use it! Locate can be selected by typing 'L' while at the command line in the Customer Input Screen. ********************************************************************** * During Criteria selection if you select a date field as part of your filter AND the date specified is Today's Date, Datacal will pop up a window asking if you would like to use the New Date Feature. The new Date Feature will allow you to save a FLOATING Current Day's Date as part of your criteria. For Example: Let's say you often print letters or reports for people whose Follow-Up Date is equal to Today. Normally you would have been forced to go through the entire criteria selection each time because your saved criteria would have a HARD CODED & FIXED DATE in it (ie. 12/14/90) . By using the new feature everything about your filter would remain the same except it will now be smart enough to know to use TODAY's current date, whatever that date happens to be. It will read your computer's clock and use that date as part of the filter. To Use New Date Feature: Proceed with your criteria selection as normal. Enter in Today's Date for a Date field selection. Datacal will sense that this particular filter may be a candidate for the Floating Date Feature and will POP UP a Box to allow you to choose what you want to do. Any dates entered other than today's date will have no effect on the proceedings. NOTE: Make sure you save the filter for future use or you would have lost the whole point of it. ********************************************************************** * Phone Dialer & Automatic Comments: Previous versions of Datacal would always update your Comments database with the message "Call Made Using Dialer" as well as the date of the call. For some people this proved to be a great feature. It saved extra keystrokes by the user. However some people use the phone system in Datacal so much or use comments in a particular way that this automatic updating was an undesired annoyance. Version 3.0 provides a way to eliminate the unwanted comment entries. When you run DATACAL SETUP you'll be asked if you would like to have your comments updated with phone calls. Answer NO if you do not and YES if you do. ********************************************************************** * Accessing Comments When Phone Call is Made If you use Function Key to call a customer a popup screen will appear to let you update the LAST CALL field. You may now also press the letter 'C' to do the update and immediately bring up your comments. When you return from Comments, you may then update the Follow-Up date in the normal fashion by using the arrow keys. Some of our users felt this method would be in tune with they way they actually do business. 1 - Make the call, 2 - Enter a Comment 3 - Enter a Follow-Up date after the conversation is over. ********************************************************************** * Single window in MailMerge & numbers for choice instead of scroll By popular demand we have returned to selecting one of the forty Mail-Merge letters by choosing the number of the letter. In reality this method does make more sense and is quicker than scrolling through the list and hitting return. It also makes it easier to select a particular letter using the built in macro feature in Datacal. The duplicate view of letters in two windows was found to be unnessary an has been removed. ********************************************************************** * Printing MailMerge to Single Person & several Name Matches are Found If you wanted to print a Form Letter to Ben Jackson and you had several Jacksons in your database, Datacal would find the first Jackson and print the letter. Now Datacal will pop-up a box with all of the Jacksons in a scrollable window. You can then scroll down to the appropriate individual, hit return and have the letter printed. We were surprised that none of our users called to let us no this could be a potential problem. This new change was made due to our own in house use. We think you'll really appreciate it. This new feature will work for both finding Company names & Last names. ********************************************************************** * Creating Form Letters is Performed in A Word Processsing Window The creation of Form Letters (Mail Merge) is now performed in a more Word Processing type of window. This means that your text will wrap when you reach the end of the line and you may scroll through your text much more easily. You can create up to 3 pages for a form letter. This section is very similar to the way the notepad has always worked. ********************************************************************** * Run Your Own Word Processor You may now access your own word processor from within Datacal Plus. A sixth choice has been added to the NOTEPAD pull down menu called: 'Run Your Own Word Processor'. To accomplish this, you or your consultant will have to create a batch file in the Datacal directory that contains the DOS commands to run your text editor. A sample of such a batch file is listed below. WP.BAT -> d: //log on to drive D cd\wp //change to Word Perfect directory wp //start the program Only the commands under the d: above are actually placed in the batch file. Use your editor to create this file. Datacal will check to see if a file called WORDPROC.MEM is located on the disk. If it is NOT found (the way it will be the first time you select this option), it will ask you for the name of the batch file that loads your word processor. Simply type it in. The next time you select this option it will attempt to follow the commands located in the batch and run your program. When you are done using the editor you will be returned to Datacal Plus. Computers with lots of Expanded Memory will find this whole process is quite fast. Others will have to wait for a few moments while Datacal's memory image is store to disk. ********************************************************************** * Run Outside Program Similar to the statements above, you can run almost any Outside program from within Datacal. Function Key F-6 has been designed to read a Batch File perform those actions. To accomplish this, you or your consultant will have to create a batch file in the Datacal directory that contains the DOS commands to run your program. A sample of such a batch file is listed below. 123.BAT -> C: //log on to drive C cd\123 //change to 123 directory 123 //start the program ********************************************************************** * Deleting Customer & Invoice Records When you delete Customers from the Client Input Screen those records still exist but you can not see them. They also continue to take up space on your hard drive. To Permanently remove them from your file and free up disk space you must select the option "DELETE UNWANTED RECORDS" from the Database Pull Down Menu. You'll be given a list of the records marked for deletion and one last chance to recover particular records if you select to do so. This feature was always available in prior releases of Datacal. A new feature for this version is the ability to Mass Delete a Group of Invoices using criteria selection. For example, if your company creates a lot of invoices and you fear disk space may become a problem, you could delete all Invoices that have a Date Less Than Jan 1,1991 (ie. < 01/01/91 ). If you select to do this you must remember that these invoices will be permanently removed from your file. Associated Payments will also be deleted. We suggest some clear thinking before you do this. There is no recourse. If you do mass delete a group of invoices from the CURRENT YEAR, we caution you to NOT use the recalculate procedure in the Sales Graph. You will wind up with a graph that is not accurate because the records that it depends on have been deleted. ********************************************************************** * Balance Due On Invoices When you print an Invoice on Plain or Letterhead Paper the invoice now displays two new items. Underneath the Grandtotal amount you'll notice a line that prints the Amount Paid (including all payments) received on this invoice as well as the Balance Due Amount on the succeeding line. This was done to accomodate our users who are using Datacal as a Point of Sale system. Previously you would have to send your customer a statement to show any record of payments made. This feature simply makes the invoice more complete. Statements are still better for the OVERALL picture while this enhancement is nice for the singular one. ********************************************************************** * ID Number Field Can Now Contain Letters and Numbers The ID # field is a User Definable Field and may have been renamed to something else like Membership #, Badge # etc. In any event this field was able to contain only numbers. You may now use any combination of characters you wish. This feature makes it much more flexible in the real world. Remember this is an Index Field (For Quick Finds). Try to use it for fairly important information because of it's added power (indexing). Use other User Definable Fields for less important information that you may not need to quickly find. ********************************************************************** * Pop-Up Calendar Previously you could only access the Calendar by going into that section from the Main Menu. Now you may enter appointments and notes on the 'FLY'. When you press ALT-F9 a browsing window of your notes will appear. You can ADD, EDIT or FIND notes from this window. This features is available throughout most of the program. We feel that this enhancement will increase your usage of the the Calendar Section. ########################################################################## # Bug Fixes # Previous versions contained a bug in the invoice section that would only appear if an exact series of functions were entered. The vast majority of our users would never even incur this anamoly. The function sequence was: 1. While in the invoice section, find an invoice not belonging to the company displayed on the top of your screen. 2. When the new company appears and the found invoice is displayed, ADD a new invoice. 3. Datacal would incorrectly maintain the Company, Address & Name information from the customer record you were sitting on in step # 1 even though it displayed the correct info on the screen. This newly created invoice however would be updated with the wrong data. This occurs behind the scenes. If you printed the invoice you would notice that the wrong company appeared on the invoice. Because of this, erroneous sales amounts could be attached to the incorrect account. This oversight has been corrected. # A bug existed in the printing of Mailing Labels which caused the printing to become somewhat misaligned. This occured only when your files used the Street 2 field in the Customer file. This problem was not consistant and hard to find, but has now been fixed. The same thing applies to ADDRESS PRINTING using ALT-A in the Customer Input screen. # Although not technically a bug, a true inconvenience was found when editing a Note Pad Memo. If you pressed the ESCape key, you would lose any changes that you most recently made. The memo would revert back to it's original state. Now the ESCape key is turned off when editing a Memo or Mail Merge Letter.