From time to time we make available Sesame applications that can be purchased and downloaded (or delivered by email attachment). These applications include mini-apps containing user-adaptable specialized applications or programming routines, as well as full-blown applications with all the bells & whistles. Subscribers to Inside Sesame receive a 20% discount on all products we sell.

This compact contact manager application — as featured in the May and June 2004 issues of Inside Sesame — places a host of powerful tools at your fingertips to help you better manage and communicate with your contacts.

The application consists of four database and includes the following features:

• Fields for essential contact information.
• Find by Company and Find by Name buttons help you to retrieve the contact you want — fast.  These buttons even work at the Retrieve Spec. No more manually typing in retrieve spec parameters.
• A Subform for entering call/contact notes. The latest notes are always on top. (Shown at right.)
• A follow-up scheduler that displays a list of follow-up options along with an interactive calendar you can use to click on the specific follow up date you want.
• Facilities for helping you send email to your contacts. (Works with Outlook and Eudora.)
• Facilities for printing merge letters for the current contact only, or all the retrieved contacts.

Powerful Features The Follow-up scheduler (right) lets you select a follow-up interval, or optionally pop up an interactive click-n-pick calendar so you can select the exact follow-up date you want. Use the letters database (left) to compose your merge letters. Insert Q&A for DOS-like merge field tags (*Last Name*) to merge your database information. Select your font and font size, enhance your letters with bold, italic and underline — even add images, such as your company logo and signature.

Good-Looking Merge Letters on Demand
With a click of a button you can print a merge letter for just the currently displayed contact or for all the contacts you've retrieved.

You can have as many merge letters as you like in your Letters database. Each letter can have it's own font, font size, line-spacing, enhancements, merge fields and grahpics.

Place your company's logo at the top of each letter and your signature graphic at the bottom if you like.

Your merge letters are automatically displayed in Preview mode first, where you can review them before printing them out. To print them, simple click File / Print.

The Contact Manager / Merge Printer application is ready to use as is, and modifiable to suit your particular needs. Documentation for the application is in the May and June 2004 issues of Inside Sesame.

Sesame 1.0.4 introduced some powerful new programming functions that enable the application designer and database administrator to find out all kinds of valuable information about what's on their Sesame forms, including:

• The names of the layout elements on the form along with their labels (which can differ).
• The type of element (Text, Image, Push Button, Combo Box, List Box, etc.).
• The database field name the element is bound to, if any.
• The type of database field the element is bound to (String, Date, Float, Boolean, etc.).
• The element's precise X and Y coordinate positions on the layout.
• The element's Width and Height.
• Whether the element is Read-Only and if it's Visible or not.

Now, with our our comprehensive Data Dictionary, you can gather all this information about any form in one place — a convenient organized table that displays in your browser, where you can print it as a reference for all kinds of database operations, including copying records, mass updates, imports, exports, and the like. With the Data Dictionary, you take the guesswork out of it, preventing mistakes and maintaining data integrity.

The Data Dictionary couldn't be easier to use. You simply copy the program from the supplied file, paste it into any form element slot at the Mass Update Program Spec, then run the mass update. In a second or two your browser will display the complete data dictionary for the form. You don't need to go into Sesame Designer or modify the form in any way.

Are you ready for Bruno's Budget Dental Tools? No? Well, all you have to do to adapt this ready-to-use application for your company is add your own customers and products to the supplied databases and put your own letterhead at the top of the supplied Microsoft Word invoice merge doc.* You can then begin entering orders and printing  invoices for real.

As featured in the March/April 2004 issues of Inside Sesame, the invoice form looks up a customer three ways — letting you add a new customer on-the-fly — and pastes the name and address into the Bill To and Ship To fields. You add ordered items and quantities effortlessly from convenient pick-lists, and calculate the invoice total with the click of a button. Any sales tax and shipping charges are automatically added in.

And there's more. The separate LineItems database automatically stores each item ordered along with the quantity ordered, the amount, the invoice number, invoice date, and customer number. This

You can use this application "right out of the box" with the few modifications noted above, or creatively adapt it to your company's particular needs. Everything in the applications is fully modifiable.

The invoice database places no limit on the number of ordered items an invoice can contain. The invoice merge document is designed to handle up to 20 items. But even this is user modifiable.

If you need an order entry/invoicing application, you will save days of work with this package. The application is documented in the March and April 2004 issues of Inside Sesame, so you will need to purchase these separately if you don't already have them.

*For a small additional charge, we will replace the logo and letterhead in the merge doc with your own, plug in your tax rate and starting invoice number, and add your company's name to the top of the invoice form. Contact us.

Sesame’s import facilities don’t accommodate Fixed or Table ASCII files. If you frequently deal with these kinds of files, you need our Fixed ASCII to Standard ASCII Converter.

This hardworking little Sesame application accepts a Fixed ASCII input file and converts it to a Standard ASCII file, complete with comma delimiters and quotes around the values — the kind of file Sesame and most other programs import best. The Converter accepts Fixed ASCII files of up to 15 fields (individual columns of data) and is user-modifiable to handle even more.

The Converter works similar to Q&A’s Fixed ASCII Import / Export screens. You simply type in the starting position of the data value, type a comma, then type in the data value’s length. For each conversion, you can save the record with a description of the job. This way, you can return to the same record to convert future files of the same structure.

If you frequently deal with Fixed ASCII files, the Fixed ASCII to Standard ASCII Converter is just the ticket. Even if you aren’t importing the data into Sesame, it still makes a great little file converter in your data management toolkit.

Sesame’s import facilities will only import ASCII files where (1) the delimiter is a comma or (2) the delimiter is any character and all values are enclosed in quotes. If you frequently deal with delimited ASCII files that do not have their values enclosed in quotes, you can use the ASCII to Standard ASCII Converter.

This Sesame 1.0 application accepts a delimited ASCII input file and converts it to a Standard ASCII file, complete with comma delimiters and quotes around the values — the kind of file Sesame and most other programs import best. The Converter accepts delimited ASCII files of any length.

You simply type in the input file's path and filename, the output file's path and filename, and specify the delimiter character (the character or characters that separate each data value) in the file you want to convert.

If you frequently deal with delimited  ASCII files that do not conform to Sesame's import file requirements, the ASCII to Standard ASCII Converter easily pays for itself after a few conversions. Even if you aren’t importing the data into Sesame, it still makes a great little file converter in your data management toolkit.

To convert Fixed or Table ASCII to Standard ASCII, see the Fixed ASCII to Standard ASCII Converter above.