We now call this "old room" thinking.

Which brings us back to our story. In the old room way of thinking, you'd assume your manager would come running to you to prepare a report showing the top ten products. But with IntelliVIEW installed, your manager (and therefore you) are in a new room.

All she's got to do is open up IntelliVIEW and click the Quantity column, to show the unit sales in descending order, as shown in Figure J.

FIGURE J


Click the column. See the result. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It's literally an operation that takes a second and your manager now has her information. And you don't have to go back into that old room where you needed to do custom programming or hack the database design.

In fact, your manager can even send that report directly to her manager without your involvement. Figure K shows the Export To menu, which includes Excel and PDF as options.

FIGURE K


Export your report to PDF right from within Notes. Roll over picture for a larger image.

One click on the menu item and the report is generated as a PDF, which can then be read in Acrobat. You can see the result in Figure L.

FIGURE L


Your PDF report is now ready. Roll over picture for a larger image.

What's it all mean?
There's a whole lot to this product we don't have space to cover. There's an entire array of easy and very powerful filtering options we're only just mentioning now. You can do very deep multi-dimensional analysis and data mining using features we haven't mentioned. You can generate attractive reports, custom-style cells based on values and conditions, and do a whole lot more.

This is a big, capable prorduct and we're very impressed with it. It installed well, it functioned smoothly, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and it came chock full of useful little touches that showed real care in the program's design.

Those of you who've read my articles know how much I hate giving 5 out of 5 scores. You know I expect a product to be all it can be before I'm willing to even consider awarding a perfect score.

But given that IntelliVIEW does everything it's supposed to, and does it all, smoothly, from within Notes, and given that it even does some things that were unexpected and yet very much appreciated, we have no choice but to grant this product a very intelligent 5 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 5 of 5