Last week CC Pivot went on the road to the great state of Texas. We visited three FMPUG meetings in Houston, Austin, and Dallas, each organized by the fine folks at Mighty Data. (If you aren’t a member of an FMPUG group, you should consider checking it out!) It was a whirlwind trip that we affectionately call the Texas Tour. At each meeting we presented our newest product, CC Pivot, and received some very good feedback. Here’s a couple photos we snapped along the way.

Houston’s Skyline

Somewhere Between Houston and Austin

Texas State Capital at Austin

Dallas’s Maze

We were pleased to be able to meet with the groups and each offered unique feedback; some even providing feature requests for a future version! CC Pivot’s unique ability to create pivot tables as a cross-tab report provides a very useful addition to any FileMaker solution, and many of the participants felt likewise.

This tour represents our second trip to various FMPUG meetings (the first being back at the end of July, beginning of August and was along the west coast). We have enjoyed meeting many different FileMaker developers and users and are excited to be able to provide them a useful tool for their solutions.

If you have questions about how CC Pivot can best be used in your organization or in your FileMaker solution to enhance your reporting capabilities, feel free to contact us at info@clevelandconsulting.com.

Bugs, what bugs?

Software bugs are called bugs for a reason – they’re small and hard to find! So we’ve been spending a little time doing some search and destroy here at CCI. We recently uncovered a bug in the plugin for our FileMaker reporting tool, CC Pivot. It produced an error in CC Pivot when the data being reported on had extraneous return characters. Fortunately, our crack team was able to quickly diagnose and solve the problem! CC Pivot (Full & Free) has been updated, so rest assured, this bug has been eliminated from our product lineup.

Updating Your Solution

If you’ve purchased CC Pivot, we’ve sent out an email with instructions on how to install the update (it’s pretty easy!). You can see the instructions here. If you’re not sure that you have the latest version, open the preferences in FileMaker and look at the CC Pivot plugin. The newly updated version is 1.043, if you’re using 1.042 or earlier, then it’s time to update. If you’ve purchased CC Pivot and did not receive an email about the update, just send us an email with your email address and/or order number from your purchase to support@clevelandconsulting.com and we’ll send the instructions on how to download the update right away!

Cleveland Consulting, Inc., is pleased to announce the release of CC NonProfit v2.1.

Most significantly, this version adds a Change Log to the Donations amount field. This feature was added at the suggestion of a fiscal officer at Ohio State University, who recommended it to provide a high level of internal control for a nonprofit organization. (We won’t mention that this  fiscal officer happens to be the spouse of the CC NonProfit product manager.) The related report on the Change Log will allow administrators of an organization to view any changes to the amount of donations, with the date, account of the person making the change, and the reason for the change.  (Of course, to be effective the Change Log must be paired with appropriate FileMaker account security.)

This release also adds a feature frequently requested by our customers: the option to print address labels for bulk correspondence mailings. This option supplements the ability to print addresses directly on envelopes which was part of the previous version.

In addition, this new version updates its import wizard to include importing data from CC NonProfit Free and from version 2.0, as well as from v1.x.

You can continue to check out CC NonProfit on a public server, at fmp7://east.01.fmsdb.com/ccnonprofit2-1.fp7. Or, test out our lighter version, CC NonProfit Free. When you’re ready, purchase this latest release of CC NonProfit.

We are pleased to announce the release of CC NonProfit Free 2.1, a lighter version of CC NonProfit.

CC NonProfit helps an organization keep track of its various contacts, donations, pledges, and events, giving it the ability to send targeted mailings to its constituents, and giving it robust reporting capabilities for reporting to its donors, administrators and grantors about the donations and pledges it has received. While the free version does not have all of these capabilities, it remains a full-featured program, making it a valuable asset to any organization. Compare the features of the Free and Standard versions of the software on the product page for CC NonProfit.

Or download the free version directly.

We are proud to announce the release of a lighter, but free, version of our wildly successful product CC Pivot.

We have gotten great reviews of the existing full product, we wanted to make the product available in a lighter version to everyone. So many folks have told us this is the one feature they wished Filemaker had always had, so we thought we would make a version available to the whole community.

For people who aren’t aware of what  CC Pivot does, there are is a walkthrough video of it on our site. However basically it allows the creation of a pivot table, or cross tab report, directly in FileMaker Pro, the integration is super simple, 5 minutes or less, and no modification to your existing system is necessary.

The free version of CC Pivot bass all the core features of the full version, the core version add the ability to report on related fields as well as a host of other additions. A full feature comparison is available on the product page.

If you don’t want to read about all the differences and just want to grab the free version, you can do that here.

Thanks for helping us make CC Pivot a great product, and please keep the reviews and suggestions coming. You can post them here, or email them to us directly at support@clevelandconsulting.com

We are pleased to announce a new version of CC Pivot just released today, as a free upgrade to any existing customers.

We have added the most requested feature, in a way I hope you’ll like, Export to Excel. We have always supported copy and paste from the pivot table to Excel, but as an built in function, we relied on user interaction to get the data over. Now it is as simple as one click to save your pivot table to an excel file.

Check it out over in our store, or buy the unlocked product here.

If you are unfamiliar with the product you cay try the locked demo here.

Already own CC Pivot and want to upgrade? Just contact us sales@clevelandconsulting.com with your original order number and we can send you the new file. If you have already integrated the solution we have even created an import routine so you can save your pivot tables you already created.

Leave any feedback in the comments below, and if you have purchased the product, don’t forget to review it at the bottom of this page.

We had a great time at the FileMaker Developers Conference, can’t wait until next year. We got some great feedback regarding CCPivot for making cross tab reports in FileMaker Pro.

John Sindelar of SeedCode showed the product in his ever popular year in review session and was able to integrate it live during his presentation, which was great.

Final party was also a lot of fun, but Sam and Jesse from 360 works have some payback coming as you can see in the video.

FileMaker DevCon Video from Cleveland Consulting, Inc..

A new report has been added to CC NonProfit to give organizations a way to give donors a periodic report on their donations.  The report, called “Donations by Contact by Date Range” lets an organization print individual reports for its donors.  This might be used to send an annual donation statement which donors could use in preparing their tax returns.  Or it could be used as a monthly reminder of a person’s donations for the organization’s fiscal year compared with that person’s pledged amount.

To help organizations create their own reports in CC NonProfit a new section has been added to the Help materials, providing guidance for building new layouts and creating the new scripts which will be needed to integrate the reports into their system.  This is found at http://help.clevelandconsulting.com/CCNonProfit2/Reports.

In addition, a section on Importing Data into CC NonProfit has been added to the Help pages.  It can be challenging adding data from one system into a database using a different system.  This can be especially true when importing data from a flat system, such as an Excel spreadsheet, into a relational database such as CC NonProfit.  These Help pages describe the table structure for the Contacts section of CC NonProfit, and offer some guidance for successfully importing spreadsheet contact information.  See http://help.clevelandconsulting.com/CCNonProfit2/Installation#Import.

We have now made our latest version of CC NonProfit (version 2) available for review on a public server.   fmp7://east.01.fmsdb.com/ccnonprofit2.fp7.  No password is needed to open the file.

We also provide a free, 10-day demo version of CC NonProfit. But with the version on the server there is no time limit. You will need FileMaker 11, either Pro, Advanced, or Go, to open the program. But once open, you can check out its features by adding records, and using it as if it were your own agency’s software.

Check it out. And if you want to know more, contact us at ccnonprofit@clevelandconsulting.com.

So I got curious about the distribution of the FileMaker community and the first place I though to look was the FMPug user group site, which lists the pug chapters. Since the chapters have addresses for their meetings I thought I would do a quick screen scrape to see if I could map them all and put them in Google maps easily.

The results were pretty easy to come up with, and I thought I’d share them. If anyone has any additions or wants to help correct any of the locations, just leave me a note in the comments.

View FMPUG Mashup in a larger map