Today was the day that the laser printer died. For the fifth time! This time it's staying 
dead and being replaced. I've been partial to both HP and Lexmark laser printers for use in land title operations. We need features like multiple input trays and sometimes multiple output trays. I settled on a nice 52 page per minute HP Laserjet Ent 600 M602N Printer
Closing Counter Web based Report
Does your Closing Counter look like this?
Here is a screen shot of a Closing Counter report for SoftPro ProForm viewed through a web browser. Normal reports use a Crystal Reports engine and are old time stuff compared to a web page that runs on a local IIS server.
This report tallies Purchases, Refinances and Equity deals over different time frames. The previous Month, the previous week, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the rest of this week and what's coming up next week are the time frames this report uses. Click on the image to see a larger size. Once your site is in place, this report is a few hours time. If you'd like to start saving money by running web based reports, let me know, I'd be happy to help.
SQL convert "yyyyMMdd" integer or string to a Date that works in SoftPro
The last few weeks I've been working with Web based Reporting for SoftPro ProForm. It's been fun creating management review pages with dials and lights.
I've enjoyed combining multiple report outputs on one concise easy to ready web page. Along the way, it's been necessary to display SoftPro Database formatted date fields in a grid. They come through in 20130524 or "yyyyMMdd" format. It was easy enough to format that in a grid as "yyyy-MM-dd" format which worked until I started exporting the grids to Excel, when the formatting failed. So I began a search to fix it, at the SQL level.
FedEx Web Services went down today
The Web is an interesting place, when we start distributing systems over diverse physical locations fun things can happen. One person can have access to a resource, while another one is denied. Chicago says but it works for me while Columbus says, it's down for us. Today after a 4 or so hour outage of FedEx Web Services that's precisely what happened as the systems were coming on line.
Word 2007 and 2010 Insert Key doesn’t work
Microsoft for some unknown reasons after 35 years of consistent behavior decided to change the way the Insert key works in Word. Normally pressing the insert key toggles between Insert and Overtype. Most people live in Insert mode, but sometimes Overtype is nice, the engineers at Microsoft decided you no longer needed Overtype mode. Who knows why.
Data Collector Mass Update
Today I needed to add 25 fields to Data Collector. Where as it's totally doable using the correct application, it is the slow way. And since we work on development servers, the same changes need made on the production servers, so the time is duplicated. There is a quick and safe (mostly safe) way to update ProForm Data Collector, from SQL Server Management Studio
ProTrust PTWIN-130 Error window
Today's fun call of the day was related to ProTrust having a Ledger locked for editing. The Error (PTWIN-130) is displayed when someone attempts to add a transaction to the ledger. No one knew who or why, but it's been like that for days. There's a right way and a wrong way to fix this particular problem. We'll talk about the wrong way first.
