Hi there. It's been awhile.

I have been doing a project for the last 10 years for a client in which I prepare annual employee benefit statements. The actual revelation programming side has been simplistic, with the most effort merging the data to my Apple Laserwriter. I plan to convert the merging to the HP Laserjet 6P, but since Arev has not been a very compliant proportionally spaced report generator all these years , I may need to export my data to a word processor data file.

Anyway, the project has been easy but my customer wants a pie chart included on each employee's benefit statement that is uniquie to that specific employee (built from the data in their row of the table). I had thought of converting the project to OpenInsight but I have just not had the time and I am much more knowledgeable in AREV.

In a short example, let's say I have 2 employees. Their data is as follows:

EE1:

Life Insurance cost - $500

Medical Cost - $6,000

Retirement Plan Cost - $1,600

Statutory Costs - $5,000

Total cost- $13,100

EE2:

Life Insurance cost - $350

Medical Cost - $3,500

Retirement Plan Cost - $600

Statutory Costs - $4,000

Total Cost - $8,450

The pie slices would need to represent each cost as a percentage of the total cost and that pie chart would need to be displayed on the statement. If I export the data, this could get tricky, since the pie chart would have to be saved as some external file. If it can be done within AREV, the layout would be easier.

I looked into generating pie charts from Lotus/Excel/MSWorks but they only seem to be able to generate a pie chart of either the entire table or each row when done manually. Also, in order to save the chart, you have to cut/paste and save as a .bmp, which could get very time consuming when we are talking about 600 employees.

I have yet to see that anyone has successfully done this in AREV. Since it has been a while since this topic was brought up, I thought I would ask again if anyone had any ideas. Also, I seem to remember some add-on report writers that can handle proportionately spaced printing (like a normal report writer). I'd appreciate an update on that too.

Thanks very much.

Michael

This should actually be straightforward if you are proficient in Macro programming in Word. Essentially we have done this by writing out a series of DOS files and having the Word Macro pick these up for each employee.

As for proportional font reports - you could install a runtime OI and a copy of our reporting tool S/List - see our site for details.

Sprezz

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

This should actually be straightforward if you are proficient in Macro programming in Word. Essentially we have done this by writing out a series of DOS files and having the Word Macro pick these up for each employee.

As for proportional font reports - you could install a runtime OI and a copy of our reporting tool S/List - see our site for details.

Sprezz

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

This should actually be straightforward if you are proficient in Macro programming in Word. Essentially we have done this by writing out a series of DOS files and having the Word Macro pick these up for each employee.

As for proportional font reports - you could install a runtime OI and a copy of our reporting tool S/List - see our site for details.

Sprezz

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Hi Michael,

Just confirming what the Sprezz guys said. We have used the same technique of using automated excel macros to create the charrts/reports.

You can export the basic report, and set up a macro in an excel spreadsheet that imports it, and for each row in the table, produces the graph and associated employee report nicely formatted and automatically calls the Excel "Print" function.

This will solve both your problems at the same time.

Regards

Warren Kinny

Exodus Systems

Sydney Australia

wjkinny@resmaster.com

Thanks Warren & Sprezz!

I think that might be the easiest solution right now. While I'm retiring my Apple Laserwriter from active duty, I'll bet I could have figured this out with some postscript programming withing the RBASIC filed I use to do the rest of the report. Oh well, it's only for one client and I just didn't have the time. I'll look into the Word/Excel merge feature!

Michael

Being a Lotus/Wordperfect guy, I spent the morning on the phone with Lotus who pretty much told me that I couldn't do what I wanted to. They said that their is no way to save the pie charts or automate a cut and paste routine between applications (they were assuming I would use WordPro instead of Wordperfect). The only way they indicated I could accomplish what I wanted was to dump my data from AREV. Then I would go to the first row, manually create a chart, select it, copy it, paste it into MSPaint (of all things) and then save it as a bitmap. I would then have to go through this manually for all 400-500 rows. Or I could automate the creating of the pie chart but then manually cut, paste, and save.

This doesn't make any sense!

Michael

Don't want to "rain on the Excel (or Quatro) parade, but Corel WordPerfect 2000, as well as version 8 and 7 offer BETTER charts and tables than the spreadsheets. We frequently do instense Medical Office Patient Surveys.

O.I. colects the data, mostly check boxes and radio buttons. We use Arev's TCL to dump it to WordPerf, and let it create the bar, pie or whatever charges and tables.

Many of our competitors would like to be able to do this, but they try to use a spreadsheet for data input, a less than desirable method.

IMHO, WP7, 8 and 9 run rings around MS Word, in ease of use and power.

And, no! I don't work for Corel.

Dean-

I looked at Wordperfect 2000, which I have, and it comes awfully close to what I want. While I can easily dump the data from AREV to a merge data file in Wordperfect and then create the form file with the merge data fields, I was disappointed that the chart datasheet would not accept merge fields in the pie columns. It seems that all of these programs come just short of doing what would seem to be a fairly common task. If I had data for all my records associated with field names Field1, Field2, and Field3, etc., I should be able to slip Field1, Field2, and Field3, etc. under the pie column so that when I went to merge the form with the data records, all of the pie charts could be built on the fly using the data information. I suppose I'll need to create some other function during the merge to do this and macro writing in Worperfect is a bit beyond my range of knowledge.

It does look like a good possibility though!

Michael

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