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.

Got some good responses, but still would like to know how you get column width as I get a report of 5 or 6 characters and is there an easy way to right align a column of numbers so that with or without a decimal they will lign up?
Foster

I have tried width and it did nothing or in some cases did not "stick".  Several changes do not seem to "stick" , but no clear pattern.
As for columns, look on page 354.  $ sign lines up nice but not cents.  Column would look even more rough if dollar amounts  varied in number of digits, i.e. $1.00 or $20.00.
Foster

It seems to be all or nothing 
If I set width at 35 (characters?) then all report elements are set to that.  If I set Right Top as alignment then all elements are Right Top set.

Hello Foster,

I just got your database and I think you are confused as too what you are seeing.

In the report IRBOXLIST you have widths of, in order, 48, 90, 60, 48, 120, 60. If you click the "Look/Position" tab of the Property Viewer, found directly below the Property Editor, you will see the width settings.

The Property Viewer displays the settings for the currently selected item. Property Editor is where you change the settings for the currently selected item. Property Editor holds the values that you have set so far this session, so you can set them to the next element you select, if you wish to.

A nice explanation of Property Editor vs. Property Viewer can be found on page 79 of the Sesame Users Guide.

Quote:


This is do-able with any version of Sesame since 1.0.2, by using more than one view in the report and setting the column widths.

This is extremely easy to do in 1.0.5, by using more than one group (no need to set column widths).

For version 1.0.2 through 1.0.4:
View are not bound to columns - but the group within a view (all groups are in a view) are bound to columns. Because you can then set the widths the same for a set of columns in the group the same in the two views, you end up with columns that are the same size and position in each of the two views.

For version 1.0.5:
Just create a new group within the same view. No need to set widths.

Well it has been a month since I posted above, and to be fair to Sesame & the Team who created it, I have been creating a lot of reports, and due to inexperience above I posted that the report writer was the weakest point in Sesame I was dead wrong, it is just as powerful if not more than any other report writer I've ever used including access, I hope I can keep my big mouth shut    and stop raging Sesame when it just being ignorant of  Sesame that's the problem, Sesame has turned out to be the best and easist program I've ever used since Q & A., and I've just started getting into it, I have my inventory program working the way I have alway's wanted it to, but never could get it to in any other program!! And it took about 20 hours  from beginning to end. My application is 70% complete. A super powerful program. Thank You !!!