Elm Software Blog

iDo Pro Reports + Language Translation

John — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:57:00 -0100

Intro

In iDo Wedding and Event Professional Edition, you can replace report captions (column headers) with whatever text you like. This allows you to accommodate for languages other than English for your reports.

To replace report captions:

Click Options.
Select ‘Report Captions’. When you first view the list of report captions, you will notice that
Double-click the report captions you wish to replace with alternate text. Add new entries such as below. For example, ‘Address’ is what currently shows up in reports…you can replace this text with ‘Dirección’ and all reports will print ‘Dirección’.

We added this feature as a part of iDo 9.5…we hope that this is beneficial to you, your clients and your vendors when printing reports.

Changing DPI (Dots Per Inch) settings

John — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:47:00 -0100

Introduction

If you iDo Home screen looks ‘off’, changing your computer’s DPI setting to ‘Default scale (96 DPI)’ will resolve this issue. Below is a screenshot sent from a customer with the screen not looking as expected.

Other parts of the program will not look ‘right’. Let’s change the DPI setting to ‘Default scale (96 DPI)’.

Resolution for Windows Vista/7

To adjust your DPI settings:

Open ‘Control Panel’
Click on ‘Personalization’
Click on ‘Adjust font size (DPI)’

Select the ‘Default scale (96 DPI) setting and click ‘OK’
Reboot your computer and iDo should look as expected

Resolution for Windows XP

To adjust your DPI settings:

Right-click on your desktop and click ‘Properties’ from the popup menu
Select the ‘Settings’ tab
Click the ‘Advanced’ button
Select ‘Normal size (96 DPI) from the DPI Setting dropdown and click OK
Reboot your computer and iDo should look as expected

iDo does not show the home screen? Let’s reinstall Flash

John — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:57:00 -0100

Introduction

iDo and PrintJobs require you to have Adobe Flash installed on your computer. If you do not have Flash installed (installed correctly) on your computer, iDo and PrintJobs will show their ‘splash’ screens but will not open to show the application.

As a part of iDo and PrintJobs installations, Flash is installed. Even though we attempt to ensure that Flash is installed during our installations, Flash can sometimes get unregistered on your computer … and cause the applications to not launch.

Resolution

Using Internet Explorer (important) visit www.flashkit.com.
Note: It can be any website that uses Flash, but I know that flashkit works perfectly.
When you reach this site, you ‘should’ see Flash movies blinking/playing but you will not.
The site will then show the yellow bar at the top (Windows XP) or…an installation message like the below.
Click Install.
The screen may flicker as part of the instllation…when you believe it is done…click ‘F5’ to refresh the page.
All movies should be visible and playing.
Run iDo or PrintJobs and both programs should run as expected.

Note: Internet Explorer is required because it installs Flash as an Active X. Firefox does not resolve this issue because it installs Flash as a plug-in. They are different and only Internet Explorer produces the solution.

If you do not have Internet Explorer or if the above does not resolve the issue, please contact us.

Transferring iDo Wedding Couple Edition to a new computer

John — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:00:00 -0100

We find that many customers are buying new computers to replace their old ones, and they want to continue using iDo Wedding Couple Edition on their new computer. The steps below help transfer your iDo software from your old computer (Computer A) onto your new computer (Computer B).

Back up your database on Computer A

Close iDo on Computer A.
Locate the iDo Database file on Computer A and right-click it and select ‘Copy’.
Database file location: C:\Elm Software\iDo\Database\ido.elmdata
Note: This file contains all the data that you have entered in iDo on Computer A.
Paste the file onto a backup device (thumb drive/CD/email to yourself on an online account).

We recommend that you regularly back up your database in the event of a computer crash.

Install iDo onto Computer B

Download iDo Wedding Couple Edition and save the installation to your desktop.
Double-click and install iDo.
Open iDo and enter your product key. Contact Elm Software for your product key (if necessary).

Transfer the iDo database from Computer A to Computer B

Make sure iDo is closed on Computer B.
Copy the ido.elmdata from your backup device and save it to the following folder on Computer B:
Destination database file location: C:\Elm Software\iDo\Database\
When it prompts to ‘Replace existing file’, click Yes.
Run iDo on Computer B and all of the data will be on computer B.

Solution to iDo closing when links are clicked

John — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:51:00 -0100

Introduction

iDo Wedding Couple Edition and iDo Wedding and Event Professional Edition use a grid control throughout the applications to show data. Sometimes the grid control is not properly registered on our customers’ computers. If this is the case, they are not able to get beyond the iDo home screen. Whenever they click a link (Contacts, Invitations, Budget, etc.), the program produces an error and closes iDo unexpectedly. The steps below resolve this issue.

Resolution

1) Close iDo.
2) Click on this link: www.elmsoftware.com/support/bin/RegRefresh.exe
3) When asked to run or save the file, click Run.

4) Click Register.

5) Message boxes should then appear all with ‘registered successfully’ text.
6) Open iDo and all links should work as expected.

If this process does not resolve the error, please contact us and then we can schedule an online meeting if that is convenient for you.

How to show file extensions in Windows

John — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:38:00 -0100

The default setting on Windows is to hide file extensions for know file types. For instance, if you have a Word document ‘My Story.docx’, it will appear as ‘My Story’ without the ‘.docx’ file extension. Not knowing the file extension leads to more confusion than good, in my opinion. Let’s all show our file extensions, shall we.

How To Steps

In Windows XP, Vista, 7, open up ‘My Computer’. Windows Vista looks like the below image, notice that there are five files, three are Word documents, and two are Excel spreadsheets.
Click on ‘Organize’ and then ‘Folder and Search Options’. (see red circle below)
Click ‘View’ and then uncheck the ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ checkbox and click OK.
After the screen refreshes with your new setting, the screen will look like the below.

Notice that you now see the file extensions of the five files above. You can see that the three Word documents have different file types. One is a ‘.doc’, another is a ‘.docx’, and the last is a ‘.rtf’. They all open in Word, but they are different. For instance the ‘.docx’ file is the current file extension of Word 2007 and is sometimes unreadable by older versions of Word, if they computer did not yet install the compatibility pack from Microsoft. Click here for the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.

Showing file extensions can also help in securing your computer. Please see this AskAboutTech blog post for more information.

iDo Wedding and Event Professional Edition 10 Released

John — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0100

On November 1st, we released iDo Wedding and Event Professional Edition 10. iDo 10 includes many improvements, please see www.elmsoftware.com/idowpe/upgrade for a complete list of the new features/improvements.

Note #1: All customers will need to re-certify their copy of iDo after the upgrade is installed.
Note #2: Apply this upgrade to all computers on your iDo network.

Payments Received

One of the biggest features is the new section in 'Contracts' titled 'Payments Received'.
In this section, you will be able to accept any number of payments and they will be applied to your invoices.
The first open invoice will have payments applied to it and then when it is completely paid the second open invoice will begin to have payment applied to it.
In the image below, you can see the first invoice is paid in full and the second invoice is almost half paid, $400 is paid and $550 is due. We believe this visual representation along with the partial payments is a big improvement, we hoe you feel the same.

Below is the 'Payments Received' tab. This shows that three payments have been applied to the two invoices.

In addition to this we added two reports:
1) All Unpaid Invoices: To help follow-up with unpaid/past due invoices
2) Account Summary: To present to your client a report showing the invoices and payment received to date.

We will continue to write about the new features in iDo Wedding and Event Professional Edition version 10.

Please contact us if you have any questions.
The upgrade is only $39.95. Buy Now

How to install a new font in Windows

John — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:00:00 -0100

To really personalize my printing projects, I will oftentimes search my list of fonts and select the one that looks the most aesthetically pleasing for the job, after which I will adjust the color and size until it is just right. I have customers who print envelopes by using a larger calligraphy font for the names on the first line and a smaller, more legible font for the address. This is partially why Elm Software developed PrintJobs in the first place – to customize the ways in which you print information.

But what if you like a font that is not on your computer? Elm Software offers a variety of free fonts available via download. If you would like to use fun, new fonts for your own upcoming printing projects – invitation envelopes, mailing labels, room layouts, reception tent cards – use the following information to properly install these fonts on your computer.

Before we discuss the steps needed to install a font on your computer, let’s discuss where fonts live.

Where fonts live

Fonts reside in a folder on your Windows computer. This folder is usually at C:\Windows\Fonts. Sometimes it is C:\Winnt\Fonts. Fonts installed on your computer appear in this folder and are usable by any program on your computer – Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PrintJobs, Tabula Rasa, etc. The image below shows my Fonts folder on my Windows Vista 64-bit computer.

Let’s say you are working on your computer, and you open a Word document that was created on another computer in Calibri font, but your computer does not have Calibri. Your computer will automatically select the closest approximation of Calibri to display the text, such as Arial or Verdana. If you are e-mailing a document (to be printed) that contains a unique font, either turn the document into a .pdf or be sure that the end computer has that font already installed. Otherwise, your print job may not end up looking like how you want it to look.

Installing fonts

Visit http://www.elmsoftware.com/printjobs/fonts.htm, locate the desired font and click the download button.
Save the zip file to your desktop.
Unzip the contents of the zip file to your desktop.
Go to your desktop and find the font file(s) and right-click and select ‘Copy’ from the popup menu.
Open 'My Computer' and navigate to your fonts folder. Example: C:\Windows\Fonts
Right-click in the ‘Fonts’ folder and click ‘Paste’.
An 'Installing Fonts' dialog window appears.
Upon completion, your fonts will be installed and ready to be used by all applications.

Install some new fonts today!

Free screen capture tools

John — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:12:00 -0100

I often need to capture a screenshot or a part of a screen when I write emails or work on a help file. This post is dedicated to two different ways to capture a part of your computer screen.

Free methods

1) The ‘Print Screen’ button is on everyone’s keyboard and not widely used or known. The ‘Print Screen’ button is towards the top right of your keyboard. When you press the ‘Print Screen’ button, your entire computer screen is captured and saved in memory and ready for your use. You can paste (Ctrl+V) the image into a Word document just to try it out.
Below is my image obtained by pressing ‘Print Screen’…click on it to see the entire image.

1a) Often, ‘Print Screen’ in itself is too much…you do not usually need the entire screen captured. That is why I recommend using the ‘Alt+Print Screen’ key combination. This captures only the active window.
Below is my image of the active window (Windows Live Writer which I use to write this blog)…click to see the image.

2) If you have Vista, you have a free screen capture tool called ‘Snipping Tool’. This tool lets you capture any part of your screen by using a selection rectangle.

To find it…Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, Snipping Tool, if you do not see it there…

To activate it…Go to Control Panel and open Program and Features. In the task pane on the left, click Turn Windows features on or off. If necessary, click Continue when prompted by User Account Control. Scroll through the list of features, check the box next to Tablet PC Optional Components, and click OK. This adds a new folder under Start, All Programs, Accessories, named ‘Tablet PC’ that contains the ‘Snipping Tool’ as well as other Tablet PC programs. I then add the ‘Snipping Tool’ shortcut to my ‘Quick Launch’ bar on the bottom by dragging and dropping a shortcut to the bar on the bottom.

Here is my ‘Snipping Tool’ on the my ‘Quick Launch’ bar.
The image below was captured using the Snipping Tool…just to show that is truly helpful. I even did the blue highlight circle…it truly is a helpful and easy tool to use…and it is free with Microsoft Windows Vista.

Outside of these free methods above, there is a program called Snag-it by TechSmith that is truly excellent and costs $49.95.

There are others, but the free screen capture methods above, plus the purchasable Snag-it should provide you with a good starting point in the screen capture world.

Stop using Internet Explorer 6

John — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:49:00 -0100

We are joining the collective voice among website designers to advise our website visitors to stop using Internet Explorer 6 and upgrade to Microsoft’s most recent version…Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer 6 is not compliant with today’s modern design concepts. Basically, it doesn’t interpret the HTML ‘code’ correctly and will not show a webpage the way it was intended. For example, this blog’s page header should look nice in all new browsers. In Internet Explorer 6, the menu above will render as text and will not look right at all.

We recommend that your download Microsoft’s newest browser, Internet Explorer 8. It is solid (and actually faster than I expected). Some of the more important features that you will get by upgrading are:

Security improvements and fixes.
Better rendering support for websites.
Enhanced privacy options.

We also recommend having a second or third browser installed on your computer.
Some options are:

By upgrading your browser, you will have a better experience surfing the web.

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Below is our Google Analytics pie chart showing our visitor’s browsers by percentage. You can see that 60% of our visitors use Internet Explorer and 30% use Firefox, all other browsers take up the remaining 10%.

Further evaluation of this information shows that 22% of Internet Explorer users use IE6. This actually means that 10% of all visitors to our site use Internet Explorer 6. As time goes by, this number of Internet Explorer 6 users will decrease to 0%…the goal of this post is to simply help this process along.

For additional reading about Internet Explorer 6, checkout this post by Scott Hanselman.
Also Google, ‘stop internet explorer 6’.

Please upgrade your browser today!