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Charting blog entries and comments with Lotus Approach

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OK I admit it, I still use SmartSuite (as if no one knew) for many things and that's because it still does some things really well.  Take for example getting data out of Notes and into nice looking reports or charts.  For that I still use Lotus Approach.  

This chart shows the number of entries I have made each quarter in my blog since it started and the number of comments received each quarter.  Then the video below it, shows you how in less than 3 minutes I was able to join together the comments and the blog entries with their unique key of the document ID and then chart the data.  Yes, I did say 3 minutes...

Blog Posts and Comments

Click here to watch the movie of how the chart was made in less than three minutes with the 10 year old Lotus Approach.  I look forward to the day that Symphony within Notes can do this...

Posted by Carl Tyler On 04/09/2008 | | del.icio.us  Technorati  Digg This 

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Yeah, I remember when they sold a slimmed down version of Approach as "Notes Reporter". Approach has always been an awesome tool for reporting or whipping up a quick forms/DB. Like some other products (ahem...) it has not been properly marketed. I don't know if you can even still buy it. I would love to see the reporting tool bundled with Notes.

Posted by Ed Maloney At 02:16:58 PM On 04/09/2008 | - Website - |


Gravatar Image2 - @1 Approach is still part of SmartSuite, IBM has not officially killed SmartSuite and licenses can still be purchased (The cheapest place to buy a license is eBay)

I remember Notes Reporter very well, I had the unfortunate task of being reorged and taking on the roll of "sunsetting" Notes Reporter.

The key feature in Notes Reporter was Notes Normalization for multi value fields. I am pleased to say that feature was added to Lotus Approach so that Notes Reporter customers could open their files.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 02:23:20 PM On 04/09/2008 | - Website - |


Gravatar Image3 - Ah memories. I'm actually drafting my "how I got into Notes" entry now. I'm at the part where I'm asked to enter data into an existing Lotus Approach database (c. 1995). Not to spoil the suspense, but shortly thereafter I began building a better database because that one sucked, and thus my software development career was born.

Posted by Kevin Pettitt At 10:41:38 AM On 04/14/2008 | - Website - |


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