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The following is a bit of a rant, involving my beef with one of Microsoft’s lesser known products, the “Works” productivity suite. More specifically, its interactions with a certain HP DeskJet 2360 (IIRC) printer.

A friend of ours does treasury work for a small business. The business owns a Dell laptop (reasonable spec machine) running Windows XP, and they’ve recently bought a HP Deskjet 2360 printer to go with it. The accounts are done in Microsoft Works 8 Databases. The business sells home-made goods such as knitted rugs, various forms of artwork and other hand-made products.

The accounts database basically stores each sale made — linking that back to the individual who produced the article being sold. The database produces invoices to be sent to each of these people, listing the items sold, the total revenue generated from their goods, and the amount they get (less the commission). Pretty simple stuff.

For reasons unknown, this decided to break a few weeks ago. The machine stays disconnected from the internet almost 100% of the time. Here’s the symptoms:

• When we try to print via the HP printer on the laptop in Microsoft Works, the application crashes, sending a crash report to Microsoft.

• The HP printer, works flawlessly in every other application.

• If we install Microsoft Works on a second PC with its own printer — we can print successfully.

• If we then connect the HP printer up to the second PC, install the drivers, then try to print, Microsoft Works crashes in the same manner as on the laptop.

Microsoft Works, when using the HP printer, crashes regardless of the content of the document. Create a new spreadsheet, type some random gibberish in two adjacent cells, select File->Print, and bang, down she goes. This is ludicrous, as the printer works with everything else, and Works works with any other printer. But this combination of printer and application causes problems.

We’ve tried installing updated drivers from HP’s site, with no success. We’re downloading updates for Microsoft Works, in the hope that may fix the problems, but I’m not holding my breath. This product would have to be one of the few products whose name is an oxymoron.

Microsoft Windows is such a soup of proprietary code mingling about, I’m amased anything works. Why they don’t dump their antiquated print system and use CUPS like everyone else (even Apple uses it) is a mystery. (I’m sure it’s doable on Win32.) There’s no excuse for these peculiar interactions — I’ve never had these ridiculous problems under CUPS.

In the meantime, I have OpenOffice 2.3 downloading for Windows and Linux. I had a play with OpenOffice Base (version 2.0 and 2.1) and it seems that should be able to do the same thing as good, if not, better than their present suite. It’s worth noting that the database is used much like a spreadsheet presently, thus doing a proper relational DB design will be beneficial.

I can’t quite figure out how to get the reports generated by OpenOffice.org to work the way I want… I can customise them to a certain degree, but once I try to do anything fancy, the whole lot breaks. Maybe the Sun Report Builder is the answer here — I’ve got it downloaded, but I need OpenOffice 2.3 to use it (and that’ll be another hour or so).

I’ve never done this sort of thing with OpenOffice in the past — I’m very new to this. Ordinarily, I’d just make a Perl script to connect to a DB of some form (or parse CSV data), take a LaTeX template, substitute the necessary data in, compile each LaTeX document as PostScript, then use GhostScript to whack them all together in a single document. I can’t however, do this under Win32, and especially can’t expect computer novices to do that. Hence why I’m looking at doing this in OpenOffice. In short though, this is going to be an interesting challenge.

Update:

I’m pleased to report, that OpenOffice 2.3.0 (I realise 2.3.1 is just out) is doing the job nicely. The comment that the OpenOffice Base application I had set up, was easier to use, and I feel, will be more scalable than the system they previously used. OpenOffice Base+Sun Report Builder, is definitely a worthy consideration when you wish to set up a database-driven report generator that’s to be used by computer novices.