jeff@cjsa.WA.COM (Jeffery Small) (07/05/89)
To: All users of the Smart Spreadsheet program on the UNIX-PC/7300/3B1. (Don't know if this applies to other hardware platforms.) Re. Bug in Version 3.10 "Report" printing (V3.10 is the upgrade). Problem: Under certain circumstances when printing out multi-paged reports of a worksheet, entire columns of your data may NOT be printed but are instead silently skipped. This problem is more serious than it first appears because all of the columns in your "Fixed Horizontal Title Block" headings WILL be printed while the "Report Body Blocks" columns MAY be skipped causing a mis-alignment of your data with the headings. If most of your columns are of uniform size, then this discrepancy is very easy to overlook and you may find yourself (as I did with some financial data) using incorrect information. Page one of a multi-page report will print correctly but page #2 may lose one (or more?) column of your Body Block along the left edge. Thus, everything on this page will be shifted left and be mis-aligned with the headers which are being printed properly. When you get to page #3, this same thing happens again. You are now missing two(+) columns of data and the mis-alignment is worse. This will continue until the last page. Note that this problem is (I believe) new to to the version 3.10 software upgrade which AT&T sent to all registered owners of the Smart Software (for the Unix-pc) and did not exist in the original distribution. Therefore, you may find that printing reports of older worksheets with the new version of the software yields different results! Also note that the problem resides entirely in the PRINTING of the worksheet. The worksheet's contents are intact and what you see on the screen is correct information. Cause: To the best of my ability to determine, the cause of the problem has to do with the setting of "Fixed Vertical Title Blocks" (FVT). Apparently, there is a bug in the software which keeps track of the current Body Block column number as you index onto subsequent pages. The "counter" fails to properly index itself - taking into account the column(s) taken up by the FVT. This error does not occur for the "Fixed Horizontal Title Blocks" which is why they get printed correctly. Workaround: 1: If your report extends across more than one page, then you can eliminate your FVTs and the problem will not occur. Of course this changes the appearance of your output and may not be acceptable. 2: Rewrite your report definitions to insure that every Group you define will fit onto one page. Then you can specify a FVT for each group. Since you can only define up to three Groups in a Report definition, this may mean that you will now need multiple Reports in order to print one crummy report. (I've tried a number of other tricks but haven't found any of them to work reliably.) In any case, when you print a report, always examine it carefully to be sure that you have all of your data printing out. Example: We will assume an existing spreadsheet of 30 rows x 40 columns with each column having a width of 7 and a printer capable of 66 lines x 80 columns per page. Rows 1-6 are your heading and you want columns 1-3 to appear on each page of the output. You currently specify: Fixed Horizontal Title Blocks Group 1: r1:6c4:40 Fixed Vertical Title Blocks Group 1: r7:30c1:3 Report Body Blocks Group 1: r7:30c4:40 To use workaround #1 do the following. However, you will only get columns 1:3 (the FVT) on page No. 1 instead of on every page. Fixed Horizontal Title Blocks Group 1: r1:6c1:40 Fixed Vertical Title Blocks Group 1: Report Body Blocks Group 1: r7:30c1:40 To use workaround #2 you will need 2 report definitions. Every time you want to print out this report, you will need to issue 2 commands selecting each of these definitions. (You should turn of automatic page numbering since they won't have much meaning for everything past Report 1.) Report 1: Fixed Horizontal Title Blocks Group 1: r1:6c4:11 Group 2: r1:6c12:19 Group 3: r1:6c20:27 Fixed Vertical Title Blocks Group 1: r7:30c1:3 Group 2: r7:30c1:3 Group 3: r7:30c1:3 Report Body Blocks Group 1: r7:30c4:11 Group 2: r7:30c12:19 Group 3: r7:30c20:27 Report 2: Fixed Horizontal Title Blocks Group 1: r1:6c28:35 Group 2: r1:6c36:40 Group 3: Fixed Vertical Title Blocks Group 1: r7:30c1:3 Group 2: r7:30c1:3 Group 3: Report Body Blocks Group 1: r7:30c28:35 Group 2: r7:30c36:40 Group 3: In case anyone is interested, I reported this problem to both AT&T and Informix (the owners of Smart Software) many months ago. In the case of AT&T, they simply do not have any reasonable methodology for dealing with significant problems with 3rd party software which they re-market. In the case of Informix, it was next to impossible to even get anyone to listen to the problem. Once I did finally manage to report it and had it confirmed as a real problem, I never heard back from them. -- Jeffery Small (206) 485-5596 uw-beaver!uw-nsr!uw-warp C. Jeffery Small and Associates !cjsa!jeff 19112 152nd Ave NE - Woodinville, WA 98072 uunet!nwnexus