chuq%plaid@SUN.ARPA (Chuq Von Rospach) (03/15/86)
I've finally gotten around to working with Ensemble, and I've run into a number of problems. Does anyone know if Hayden is planning on upgrading the product any time soon? After a week of trying to get it to do a relatively simple operation, I've found a number of serious flaws that people looking at ensemble should be aware of: o the documentation is quite dense and missing a number of important facts. o there are significant deviations from the standard mac application interface. For instance, if you are in the computation window and select some text (so that it shows black) and then click a button, the text associated with the button is appended to the selected text instead of replacing it (augh!). Also, shift click selection extensions are NOT supported, neither are double click word selections. o they claim you can do simple spreadsheet work in ensemble. Don't believe it. (Ensemble is an integrated database) o getting data in and out of Ensemble is a pain -- you can use the clipboard or scrapbook, but it is impossible to get it to generate a text file. It doesn't work well with Macwrite, Word, Paint, or anything except Ensemble because of this. o the program is exceptionally modal, which is REAL frustrating on a Mac. Not only does each of the major functions have a mode (you can be in label printing mode, or database mode, or graphing mode) but each major function has a couple of modes (usually things like 'design' and 'data entry') and many of those have many modes, too (form design has a mode for calulations, a mode for field definition, a mode for form decoration, etc....). To get from one place to another, you sometimes find yourself passing through half a dozen screens, clicking menu items or close boxes multiple times. There are no shortcuts. o when printing, Ensemble does NOT remember your previous choices in the printing manager dialogs -- if you're using mailing labels on a 12" page, for instance, you have to click the "fanfold" button EVERY TIME. Two of ensemble's fix functions are mailing label's and form letters. One thing that isn't made clear is that there are significant limitations to how these functions work. The application I've been playing with has been the obligatory phone list of my friends (name, address, phone, comments). Since I just moved, I wanted to drop notes to people and print mailing labels. There are also a number of names in the list I don't want to waste labels on, so I SELECT only those items I want to print. Simple, right? No, since the mailing label function doesn't allow selects. The documentation is REAL fuzzy here, but there is one line that says "One label is printed for each record". No mention is made of printing a subset. Well, next step is to try to build a new database with just a subset of the old database, and then run it through the label function. Well, I tried a half dozen approaches, and couldn't find one that works. The documentation doesn't cover this. Am I imagining things, or is printing a mailing label batch from a subset of a database a pretty straightforward operation? I'm rather fed up with Ensemble (it only cost me $99 on sale, and the graphing functions are well worth it just for that as long as you don't need to put LOTS of data into it...) because it seems to me that this should be a SIMPLE thing to do. Would Microsoft File handle this function properly? Anyone out there do something similar? chuq