Re: why>?

C++ does snapshot files I believe.

Acrobat doesn't work as described. It isn't functional.

What am I supposed to do? Update Acrobat every time it prompts?

I DO.

ANd it still sits there in memory / task manager after I close out of
it.

It is just a poorly written app and I reccomend avoiding apps that are
TSR.

Just because PDF is more popular than SNP; it doesn't mean that it's
the best choice.
Adolf Hitler was the winner of the popular vote.

Would you have voted for him; just because he was 'the most popular'?

PDF is evil; it is crappy; it is slow; it is a poorly designed
specification.

Adobe is big and slow and fat and they don't know how to write a
'functional / usable' app... on thier most popular product.

Because Adobe engineers are AOL / Excel BABIES and they are stuck on
the first rung of the technology ladder.

PDF is a closed system; it is a poor choice for businesses.

Keeping DATA in a DATABASE and calculating results 'on the fly' is
always a better choice than storing report results.

Emailing a dynamic report is easier than emailing PDF files.. PDF just
isn't powerful enough. It is designed by a bunch of California idiots
that don't know the slightest thing about usability.

Maybe if your database engineers weren't retarded; then they would know
how to make high-performance database applications; then maybe you
wouldn't be stuck using the wrong tool for your job.

Excel is ALWAYS less efficient than Access.

You develop some profit / loss report in Excel? I can do it EASIER,
FASTER in Access.

Access is more powerful; and it is easier to use; and it is a better
long term choice.

People that make poor strategic decisions shouldn't be architecting
complex SPREAMARTS just because that is the only technology in the
skillset.

Back in 1997; I worked at a company that trained 30+ people to write
Access queries in under an hour.

If your company can't afford to spend an hour; showing you how to use
the best tool for your job-- then your company is too inefficient to be
successful.

Basic users with simple query skills are inherently more powerful than
any spread*** dork.

Databases are scalable; they breath on re-use of business logic.

Instead of copying and pasting similiar formulas into 20,000 different
cells?

Database Reporting Tools-- like Access or Crystal Reports are always a
better tool.

And with Access I dont need to run out and buy 3rd-party add-ins in
order to email simple reports around.

Realtime or static; emailign reports with Access is much easier than
anything possible in the Excel world.

If your companies spent half the man-hours in the database world then
they did in the spread*** world; they would be infinitely more
efficient and on the right track for future success.

A software development strategy that is based on Microsoft Excel is the
wrong choice for ALL the reasons including

a) performance
b) re-use
c) scalability (65535 row limit? gag)
d) indexing-- pointing to the right data with immediate / subsecond
reponse-- instead of using find and replace go loop through hundreds
and thousands of cells in Excel
e) multi-user functionality - being able to work on the same report /
similiar reports at the same time
f) functionality - exporting and importing in the database world is
just flat out more powerful than in your baby MS Excel program.
g) data entry - enforcing real datatypes, triggers; constraints; etc
h) standardization of data - how long do you spend shaping text data
and simple searching in complex strings? free features like 'full text
indexing' allow you to get results instead of waiting for your stupid
macros to finish.


Harlan Grove wrote:
aaron.kempf@xxxxxxxxx wrote...
it's a bonehead app for aol-type bonehead people.

Though AOL boneheads can figure out how to avoid automatic update
checking while database 'experts' can't. Better to be a capable
bonehead than a thoroughly incompetent self-proclaimed 'expert'.

it should work out of the box.
...

It does, just the way Adobe wants it to. If you spent a fraction of the
time you waste ranting, you might have been able to figure out how to
avoid automatic update checking.

im not horsing around with Acrobat; it's a TSR-- terminate and stay
resident-- it stays open in task manager every single time I use it.

Unlikely even you mean in the Applications list (that is, the
Applications tab in Task Manager), so there's got to be an Acrobat EXE
file shown in the 'Image Name' column in the Process list (tab) in Task
Manager. What's that EXE's filename?

It's lost it's place in my enterprise. Not an option; it is classified
under 'buggy-ass software' and not allowed anywhere.

So either you haven't been running a recent version of Acrobat
[Reader], in which case you have no idea whether or not it still stays
in memory when it ceases to be a running foreground
process/application, or you are still running it, in which case this
statement of yours is false. One or the other is pure BS.

It's just a matter of time before Microsoft offers some webbased
XML-convertor that will translate PDF into a real tangible format.
...
Additionally; you don't have enough control over using PDF as a
datasource. Emailing around a picture of data isn't a realistic option
in the year 2006. It's just a stupid-ass format and a crappy-ass
client.
...

It won't be SNP. Maybe it'll be XPS, but XPS readers would need to
become as ubiquitous as PDF readers. And if the contents of a PDF file
were scanned images of pages containing text, unless thie PDF converted
had OCR capabilities, the XPS file would also just contain scanned
images. If the PDF file had screwball page layouts (e.g., tables
appearing in Acrobat when copied using Acrobat's text capture tool then
pasted into an editor appears as a single very long line of text by row
then by column, i.e.,

a 1 x 9
b 2 y 8
c 3 z 7

copied from Acrobat becomes

a b c 1 2 3 x y z 9 8 7

pasted into the editor - this is something I've had to handle), why
would the XPS file have a different layout?

As for file conversion, there may still be copies of pdf2text floating
around on the web. It can convert PDF files containing formatted text
into plain text. That plain text may not be in tabular format, fixed
width or delimited, but it'd still be possible to parse it using
scripting languages. Always best to use the most appropriate tools for
the task, and that often means something other than either Excel or
Access.

Access includes it's own portable document format. Why in the hell
would I go out nd BUY software when it's freeware from Microsoft??

There are lots of free programs that aren't widely used. Can any
application other than Access create SNP files? If not, that's enough
why any thinking person (so not you) would realize it'd never replace
PDF files.

I've written employee manuals; fax automation platforms
all using Snapshot.

No doubt because you use Access instead of Word. Given your warped
mind, it may be easy for you to use Access for all your word processing
needs, but few if anyone else would.

Financials, graphs; all sorts of reports in portable format.

It's becoming clearer. The reason you believe that everything is a
report is that it's the only way you can use SNP files for everything
you want to. A pathological one-track mind.

And Snapshot Viewer doesn't cost me money; and it's not buggy as hell.
SNP isn't slow as molasses.

And does it provide the forms or DRM capabilities that recent Acrobat
versions do for PDF files? Is there a utility that could convert
PostScript files into SNP files?

SNP may have its uses, but they're as rarified as DVI files.

I just wish that MS would make an 'export to SNP format' for Excel.

Please, please hold your breath until they do.

But Microsoft doesn't take Excel seriously--- because neither Microsoft
nor Excel dorks understand the market dynamics.

Microsoft doesn't understand markets but you do! That's why your own
net worth is several times more than all Microsoft's management team
put together, eh?

It's clear someone participating in this thread has no clue about
markets.

Microsoft won't make Excel strong enough-- because it would compete
with products that are more strategic.

So wrong. Take a look at the perverse ways Microsoft has chosen to
extend Excel 2007's capabilities with 'Excel Services'. It's a bad idea
to use spreadsheets for black box calculations. Spreadsheets have their
uses, but they're not replacements for high level procedural, OO or
real functional programming languages.

On the other hand, you're still unable to understand that Analysis
Services is a general purpose numerical programming tool. It may be
able to perform moderately complex calculations on data from RDBMSs,
but it lacks high-end capabilities. As I've pointed out to you before,
it lacks multiple regression functionality. It also lacks general
linear algebra capabilities such as eigenvalue/eigenvector
decomposition. Such functionality could be added, I suppose, but it
already exists in most stats packages.

And because of that, Excel is hampered; it will never be a professional
reporting tool.
...

News flash: people don't use Excel just to create reports. That may be
all you're capable of doing with Excel, but you've only got moronic
beginner understanding of it.

.