It seems to me that as a whole the respondants to this have taken one line, completely out of context and used it and it alone to support their argument. Of course, people want printed reports. Maybe it should have been phrased "the last thing people want is to be limited to only printed reports".
Access, Crystal, and others offer - modern reports that are more than simply a table in isolation on a forced printed page - or worse, an ASCII file with forced page breaks.
The intent of the response on my part (and Erika's) was to refute the claim made by Foster that Q&A reports provide enough, and that they are (in relation) to Sesame - easy to generate. Foster, may well be right in that for his business Q&A reports are enough. But that does not address the many cases where they are not. A Q&A report, hits the wall relatively early and cannot go any further, and to be taken to the end of its own limitations requires extremely obscure and nonstandard language (report codes). Once generated it is unalterable without losing all of its formatting and inserting inappropriate page breaks, headers and footers.
These limitations cannot be surmounted in Q&A. Sesame uses a standard language that is well known and accepted. Sesame reports can be altered after they have been generated. Sesame reports can be imported and used in thousands of other programs.
When the claim is made that Q&A reports are easy to generate, it can only mean that the "claimer" either memorized a couple dozen codes with their accompanying arguments and syntax, or they are not using them. But, it cannot be reasonably claimed that these codes are "easy" to learn and memorize. An actual beginner in Q&A is immediately lost. We are not born knowing Q&A report codes, and there is no alternative to their memorization.
It is true, that by using HTML as the medium for Sesame reports we had to sacrifice the automatic and user controlled pagination. But, given that HTML is an accepted language world wide, by thousands of other applications and programs, has become an accepted document language by indexing systems, search systems, word processors, spreadsheets, and other databases, it seemed a very small price to pay.
It has been our policy to accept (and catalog) the users' opinions and comments about Sesame, and to answer with technical solutions where we can (we have a better than 90% success rate). In light of that, let me say that we do hear you, and we are (and have been) investigating ways to manage the "pagination issues" inherent to HTML. We are also looking into a "print only" format for reports that wil not use HTML to allow for the repetition of column headers and footers on page breaks.
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