What the software people should tell you.

Wow, there are a ton of things that I could write about under that headline.

But today's subject is about the good things. 

They should tell you about the really cool little stuff they do to make your life better. And as a former "software person" I spent a lot of time trying to find these little individual wows in different software products.

It is hard to get the people who write the software to remember how cool a particular feature or approach is. They spend a lot of time on the boring stuff like how to post an invoice, yawn, or how to post a batch of journal entries, double yawn, or how to reconcile your bank account, triple yawn, (unless your product is written by the Danes, who used to believe that bank reconciliations were not necessary).

But this is the kind of thing that gets me excited.

 Yesterday, I was working at a CPA firm using  Sage Software's fixed asset product, FAS. Granted, the product has some areas that could be vastly improved, but here's the one thing that I just loved. Customizing their reports.

I wish I could take this feature and get other software products to use it. 

Here's how it worked :

I was trying to run a report on my fixed assets. These were winery asssets, so I needed them grouped by location, winery, cooperage (barrels), farm, and other. 

1. Sorting, Grouping, Subtotals. The report let me group by location with a simple modification from a menu, including the option to add page breaks for each group total.  ( this is pretty standard in most report writing solutions.)

2. When you click a button to "customize report", you get a list of available fields in a table on the left, and a table showing current report fields on the right. There is an arrow that allows you to move fields from the left to the right and vice versa (no big deal here either, lots of products do this.) By using this arrow, you can modify the report columns.

3. Here's the big, little feature that I loved. When you add fields (which become their own column on the report), the report writer tells you how much horizontal space on the page you have used. It shows the total amount that you have, the space used by each field in a column, and how much you have exceeded the printable page width. And then it lets you adjust the column width for each field by changing their width.


What a simple, brilliant idea.

I can't tell you how many times I have had to mess for days with reports to try to get all of the info on a single page width. And I don't want the information to be compressed to a smaller font to do it. Give me the info to decide which column can be narrower, and tell me how much space I have.

Brilliant! 


I've added a series of screen shots if you really want to see what I'm talking about here...