Good News about Button Menus

There’s good news from Maxwell Systems. They will continue to support the Button style menus you may have grown accustomed to using. To quote Eric Foster at Maxwell Systems, “Our efforts, while encouraging the Explorer menu, will not preclude you from using buttons if you desire. This option will remain available.”

As you may be aware, there’s two types of menus to navigate through your Maxwell Systems Maxwell Management Suite software.

The Explorer style menus look and act like the Windows Explorer feature. The Button style menus are similar to the old menus before you updated to the Windows version of your software.

So even though Maxwell would encourage you to use the Explorer menus, you will still have access to those good ol’ Button menus.

If you can’t visit at least FEED yourself

You don’t have to visit this web site to get the information that is posted here. You can use RSS, which is short for Really Simple Syndication, in conjuction with a news reader such as FeedDemon, to subscribe to and pull down the comments posted here.

This RSS stuff may sound a bit complicated, but it’s really quite easy. On the Tutorial page, you can access a screencast by Alex Barnett that shows you how easy it is to use RSS. More importantly, subscribing to a web-site’s feed means you don’t have to always navigate to that site to get the information you’re looking for. It will save you time and make you more productive. Give it a try! Oh, and make sure you add this site to your reading list!

Monarch mines for data

As good as Maxwell’s DataLink Module is at exporting reports and data to text, Excel, and PDF files, there are times when you need something more in your tool-kit. That extra tool could be Monarch Pro from Datawatch.

Monarch Pro is called a data mining or data extraction tool. It takes the output from any report you have, extracts the data from the report, and outputs it into a file, such as an Excel spreadsheet, for easy manipulation.

The beauty of Monarch Pro is it’s simplicity. Just print your report to a text file, then point Monarch Pro to that file. Then a simple to use parsing tool scans, filters, and extracts data from your report into a spreadsheet like format. The data can then be output to almost any type of file including spreadsheets. And once the parsing rules are defined, you save those rules as a template to be over and over each time you print the report.

Monarch Pro can also access data files directly. Almost any file can be read by Monarch Pro. Access and Excel files as well as any data file accessible via ODBC can be read and manipulated.

So if you can’t get just the right data extracted using your standard tools, consider Monarch Pro (priced at $559.00 at this time).