I am replacing my workstation (laptop) this week and decided to test Windows 8. I ordered it from Costco so I can just take it back if it won’t run my favorite old software.

To my surprise, I was able to install and run 3 different versions of Crystal (v8.5, v10 and v12/CR 2008) with no problems at all.  When I run Crystal 8.5 on my retiring Windows 7 box, I get an approval dialogue every time, but otherwise it runs fine.  On Windows 8 there isn’t even the dialogue.   Even my old version of Office XP (yeah I know)  installed and ran just fine, and it is from 2002.  So now all I have to do is learn to live with tiles.

I have just updated my comparison of RPT management utilities for 2013. These are tools that allow you to scan, document, compare and update RPT files.

Two products have been upgraded significantly in the past year. Find It EZ has added many new features in the past year and Report Miner has just recently been completely rewritten. The complete list of tools is below:

Report Miner by the Retsel Group
Find it EZ by Find it EZ Software Corp.
Report Analyzer by Cortex Systems
Crystal SpellChecker by Redeemed Software.
Search and Replace by Redeemed Software.
Mass Verify by Redeemed Software
.rpt Inspector 3 Professional Suite by Software Forces, LLC

Ido Millet of Millet Software has posted an interesting demo on his site. It is a web dashboard that is automatically refreshed from live data. What makes it unique is that it doesn’t require an application running on the server. The update work is all done using Visual Cut on a local machine.

At the core of the process there are two reports which are scheduled to be run and exported to HTML. One provides the main page while the other Continue Reading »
Web dashboard without a web application