Here we profile someone or some aspect of WISL to create a better understanding of our operations, goals and people.

QUIKREP

    WISL has always been sensitive to the need to generate reports quickly and easily.  The simplest means to accomplish this goal is to provide canned reporting accessible through structured menus. In an effort to make such facilities more flexible, WISL offers "special selection" for all canned reporting. This facility allows the user to supplement the record selection for any canned report thereby narrowing the results to those records of current interest. The "special selection" facility also provides for supplementing the sort and displaying additional attributes on canned reports.

    Canned reporting, despite its comprehensiveness or customization facilities such as "special selection", cannot satisfy all reporting requirements. Needs arise that cannot be anticipated by the best planned canned reporting structure. It can be quite frustrating for a user to know that a desired report must wait until a programmer can be assigned to write a custom program.

    To address this problem WISL developed a facility to provide a framework within which an end-user may specify all the criteria required to generate a custom report.  QUIKREP is designed to be compatible with any application reporting structure and allows the user to create and maintain a report which may then be executed from the QUIKREP Facilities Menu. Additional key features of QUIKREP include the capability to generate and retrieve select lists, a facility to generate export files that may be passed on to other processors such as spreadsheets or word processors, and the ability to accomplish attribute substitution on a global basis for selected records.

     To utilize QUIKREP at the "beginners" level requires an understanding of basic reporting concepts such as record selection logic, sorting and "break-on" for summaries. Also required is an   appreciation of the target data base. Little technical understanding is required beyond what is required to provide an English language description of the specifications for the desired report. The user does not have to be a programmer. However QUIKREP is open-ended and experienced users can generate reports that would rival those created by   programmers.

    The text version of QUIKREP has been in use since 1985 but in 1998 WISL decided to produce a desktop version to provide better integration with other tools in commonly employed by users of QUIKREP. PowerPoint demos of both versions of QUIKREP are accessible from WISL's docdemo page by clicking: http://wisl.com/prod01.htm