I am one of the greatest advocates of Act! 6, but I have made money helping disillusioned purchasers of any higher version roll back. Can I get a brutally honest answer to the question "Have the custom report feature problems been corrected?"
In what way do you mean? The reports in ACT! 6 left much to be desired. Many problems that were present from the beginning were in ACT! 3 were nefer corrected. The math was limited and not always correct. The later versions have a completely different report engine that is more flexible, has significanly more capabilities, has built in math capabilities plus the capabilities can be enhanced with embeded VB script programming.
Sorry, perhaps I should be more specific. The last time I had to roll someone back to Act! 6, it was because we could not properly create a 4 up microtear postcard mailmerge. There were other similar problems that did not exist with Act! 6. Just before I began this thread, I was Googling the topic and hit several examples of people frustrated by the failure of WYSIWYG in creating reports, the youngest of which was from Nov 2009.
I am reluctant to invest the time on my own to see if those issues no longer exist. Do not doubt for a second that I believe there is a better contact manger than ACT! 6. I specialize in consulting for Top 200 Realtors. Act! can actually turn a $60K/yr. Realtor into $250K/yr. Realtor.
As much as I HATE Microsoft's forcing Vista 7.0 on the world, I can see that resistance is futile and that I need to recommend a Vista 7.0 solution soon. Which explains the reason for this thread. If there are issues in which the latest Act! does not function as well as Act! 6 ( especially on custom reports ) then I want an honest answer right now. If I purchase the latest Act! and find the unwanted issues still exist, I am going to be ummm... shall we say Peeved ( but expressed in 4 letter words ). out here, and I will help Act! out in return.
First off, a report editor isn't a word processor so WYSIWYG in referencs to the report editor has no meaning. You're right the template you referred to, Avery 3380 couldn't be done in ACT! 6. Sage doesn't provide a standard template for it with ACT! 2010 but the Label Package add on I sell does include a template for the Avery 3380.
As to operating systems, I had no use for Vista (AKA XP ME) but I recently built a new system and I'm running Windows 7. I like the performance, especially the ability of the OS to use more than 2 Gig RAM.
