When we took a look at the packaging, we read:

IntelliVIEW provides powerful data mining, ad-hoc analysis, viewing and querying functionalities. IntelliVIEW enables Excel-like analysis on your Notes Data. It is very powerful yet easy to use. Even business users, without any technical background, can derive tremendous benefits like the ability to analyze data, and make effective and well-informed decisions from IntelliVIEW.

Want a surprise? It looks like their marketing is telling the truth. This tool is pretty slick.

Getting started
Installing IntelliVIEW was very straightforward. We just ran the installer, specified where the Notes directories live (you need to have your Notes client closed when running) and let the installer do its job.

Once the application is installed, you can run it from your Windows Start menu and you'll get the simple application interface shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Just select a Notes database to work on. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As you can see, IntelliView shows you a standard Notes database picker and lets you open your database. While that's one way to get IntelliVIEW started, what I liked better was the Notes integration. Once you've done your install, IntelliVIEW adds a few new items to your Actions menu, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Launching IntelliVIEW right from Notes is a matter of selecting a new Action. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The spreadsheet view
IntelliVIEW is a very big product. We're only going to be able to cover a small percentage of what it can do. But that'll be enough to show you what we discovered: this thing will save you some serious time.

Once you launch IntelliVIEW for your database, you'll see the very familiar spreadsheet-like display, shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


It doesn't get any more simple than rows and columns. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Throughout our examination of the product, we noticed well-designed little touches that definitely contributed to our final rating. For example, you'll notice we circled an icon in the above figure. That icon does one thing: it automatically resizes the columns to fit the window width. While such a feature isn't that hard to implement, it's an attention to detail that we don't see all that often and it's also a clear, simple feature that users are sure to appreciate -- and use.

Spreadsheet columns can easily be used to aggregate information. For example, when we wanted to know which sales came from which salesperson, all we needed to do is drag the column header AccountManager up to the gray area at the top of the screen, as shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D


Drag and drop columns to create groupings. Roll over picture for a larger image.

What's slick (we say this a lot with this product -- some of these features would make Excel better!), is that you can drag multiple column headers up to the gray zone, creating sub-groupings in seconds.

Now that we've got the program installed, and we've had a taste of what it can do, let's go back to the subject of "reasonable" requests.