Report Object - but where's the columnar report

SimPLsol at aol.com SimPLsol at aol.com
Sun Jun 15 22:56:01 EDT 2003


HyperCard, at $99, had better built-in reporting a decade ago than the $1000 edition of Revolution has today! Add Reports to HyperCard and you have the best report marker on the market - still for about half the price of Revolution.

You are correct in observing that no other XCard has good reporting. I think this may be one reason why so many people continue to use databases - which are harder to use for complex jobs and far less flexible than using Revolution or SuperCard.
I suppose the majority of Rev users do not need sophisticated reporting capabilities - those that do have not come to Revolution.

The key difference between HyperCard's built-in reports and Reports is this: with HyperCard a programmer could create almost anything, with Reports the user could create and/or modifiy anything (without even knowing HyperTalk). When we shipped our first system to New Zealand the language and the paper and business conventions required changes to almost every report in the system. The user made all of those changes, enjoyed doing it, and went on to create about 40 more special reports to handle some of their unique needs.

You will note that Reports always sold for more than HyperCard. This is reasonable. For most businesses powerful reporting is more important than easy scripting. A really good reporting engine (with a free runtime and the ability to read SQL databases as well as Revolution stacks) would easily be worth the $1000 price of Revolution.

Paul Looney



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