I was reading this software trade rag. There were a lot of ads in the magazine. I guess that's how they give me the thing for free. One ad in particular stood out. It was irreverent. It was fun. The thing had me hooked. So I went to the company's web site. I read a few blogs on there. Left some comments.A few days later I got an email from a blogger that works for the company. He offered me some free copies of some software from the site. Here was their proposition. They make it easy to produce reports using their add-in to Microsoft Word. Now we got some complicated reports that took a lot of programming on our project. However the blogger asked me to give their products a try and let him know what troubles I had.
I had some troubles figuring out their product lineup. There were some reporting engines. And there was the add in. Should I install them all? Tried to go read up some docs on the company web site. Trouble is the links on the site did not work. Damn. Well I decided to install the Word add-in and see how it worked. Setting up a database source was not intuitive at all. I struggled through it and got it to work.
After running the template provided with the install, I got the Word document to pull in some data. It was not the data I wanted to see. So I logged into the database, made some updates, and committed the changes. Then I ran the report again. However it did not show the new data. Ooops. I reported back my troubles to the blogger. This piece of software sounded interesting. But it was too much trouble for me. We probably don't need the thing on our project anyway.
