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Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Replac

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    Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Replac

    Regarding Pre-Sales Questions:

    With AlphaFive/Q-linker, Can I take customer record info from QB, use filtering to divide it into 19 seperate tables, and then have MS MapPoint link to each of those tables? (I currently do this all with MS Excel.)

    ---------------------------

    Can AlphaFive "Find/Replace" function allow me to "Find" empty Fields/cells as well as Fields/cells that match some text?

    Can I use wild cards like * and ?

    Will * catch the empty fields?

    I would like to import the customer records from QB to Alhpa Five, Filter to select the customers I want, then add a single specific text string to every QB Customer record, in a field that QB calls a "custom designed fields" within the QB customer "table." Then I would like to update QB with all the changed records. Can I do this with a couple of clicks?

    (Note that if I'm told that I will need to use Alpha Five's "Find/Replace" feature to do this, I will need to be able to use wild cards or be able to find BLANK fields as part of the Find criteria.) Can it be done with a couple of clicks once set up?

    #2
    RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

    Hi James,

    Welcome to the world of Alpha.

    The general rule is that Alpha is incredibly poweful and will almost certainly do everything you want. I cannot answer all your questions as I am not familiar with the QuickBase formats, so hopefully someone else can fill in the gaps, but I'll try to be specific where I can...


    "With AlphaFive/Q-linker, Can I take customer record info from QB, use filtering to divide it into 19 seperate tables, and then have MS MapPoint link to each of those tables? (I currently do this all with MS Excel.)
    Alpha has a full feature, easy to learn coding language along with an extensive scripting capabilty, so can automate just about anything you can imagine, including taking control of other apps., so for this question, while I am not familiar with the formats QB & MapPoint use so cannot answer this definitively, I would be very surprised if you were unable to achieve what you want.


    "Can AlphaFive "Find/Replace" function allow me to "Find" empty Fields/cells as well as Fields/cells that match some text? ...and your subsequent questions...
    From the general thrust of your questions it seems you want to separate out records based on values in fields and then perform different actions on each group of records. Alpha can certainly handle just about every imagineable sort and find in this regard as well as pretty much any subsequent manipulation. It can handle wildcards, though you wouldn't use them to find blank fields. Without more details, it's difficlt to be precise in terms of the best way to achieve your objective, but Alpha's 'isblank' function for example would return true if the field is empty. You could then attach that to an 'if' statement similar to in Excel to process the records in the manner you want...
    if isblank("fieldname")
    do this
    else
    do that
    end if

    Alpha has extensive text manipulation features and the whole program can be automated easily and in any configuration you need, so pretty much anything you do can be fully automated. Ultimately the number of clicks you need will be dependent on how often your process changes rather than any limitation in Alpha. Many people seem to try Alpha with a degree of scepticism born of experience with other products and soon end up wondering how they managed without it.

    Hope that helps.

    Regards,
    Trevor

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

      Tevor,

      Thank you so taking so much time to answer my questions.

      I was wondering about two things:

      1) When you say: "automate just about anything you can imagine, including taking control of other apps"

      Is this done similiar to using object libraries in Visual Basic? Or how do you control other apps?

      Generally:
      How would I control MS MapPoint in Alpha?

      How would I control MS Excel in Alpha?

      How would I control QuickBooks in Alpha?

      --------------------------------------------
      2) Can I quickly filter a table and enter a single string into all the cells of 1 certain column of the filtered list--regardless of what is presently in them--quickly and easily without any new code?

      Thanks again for your help,

      Jim.

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

        Hi Jim,

        "1) When you say: "automate just about anything you can imagine, including taking control of other apps"
        Is this done similiar to using object libraries in Visual Basic? Or how do you control other apps?
        Generally:
        How would I control MS MapPoint in Alpha?
        How would I control MS Excel in Alpha?
        How would I control QuickBooks in Alpha?

        Alpha can send and receive DDE commands and can also open and close any app and send keystrokes to any window you have open. The latter is the method I have used so far. I would not be at all surprised if there are other ways to do communicate between apps, but I'm afraid that those and any use of object libraries in VB are beyond my current level of knowledge. I do know, however, that there is a specific plug in for intergrating with Quickbooks. Check out this link...
        http://www.alphasoftware.com/shop/itemdesc.asp?PRODID=64


        2) Can I quickly filter a table and enter a single string into all the cells of 1 certain column of the filtered list--regardless of what is presently in them--quickly and easily without any new code?

        Absolutely.

        Regards,
        Trevor



        Comment


          #5
          RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

          there have been posts regarding interfacing with streets and mappoint - do a search. the same regarding excel.
          Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
          972 524 8714
          [email protected]

          ____________________
          "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

          Comment


            #6
            RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

            With regards to Quickbooks, we already have a program called Qlinker that imports the data from QuickBooks so you can use Alpha Five's operations on the data. We are looking into several possilbities that will allow us live access to the data as well, but this won't be available immediately.

            With regards to the Microsoft products you mentioned...if they have an OLE/ActiveX interface, Alpha Five Version 6 will be able to interact with those applications. I know we work with Excel, but I have never used Mappoint
            Aaron Brown
            Alpha Software Development Team

            Comment


              #7
              RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

              Also, regarding QuickBooks....check out www.qodbc.com. They have an ODBC driver that we may be supporting that allows direct live access to a QuickBooks database.
              Aaron Brown
              Alpha Software Development Team

              Comment


                #8
                RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

                Thanks guys, for all your helpful responses,

                Jim.

                Comment


                  #9
                  RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

                  I just wanted to clarify that QODBC may or may not work with version 5. It should work well with v6 client-server, however
                  Aaron Brown
                  Alpha Software Development Team

                  Comment


                    #10
                    RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

                    Thanks,

                    About MS MapPoint:

                    MS MapPoint can Import from, or set up a recurring link to, these files types(See attached Picture), does Alpha Five Qualify?

                    Comment


                      #11
                      RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

                      DBF should be in there, though you never know with MS.

                      If it's not, A5 will certainly export an acceptable text file.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        RE: Pre-Sales Questions: MapPoint Linking; Find/Re

                        Well, actually, dbf is not included.

                        Are you saying dbf is the file type I would need to be able to read in order to see A5 tables directly from another Application?

                        (See the picture I uploaded in last message. It shows the file types MS MapPoint accepts.)

                        Is dbf it then for A5, (short of exporting a table to a csv, or txt file?)

                        Thanks,
                        Jim.

                        Comment

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