sdOffice (tm) Automate Microsoft Office(r) from Your Application (c)2001 by Synergetic Data Systems Inc. All rights reserved. Web: http://synergetic-data.com Email: support@synergetic-data.com sales@synergetic-data.com Release history: Four beta releases, November, 2000 through April, 2001. Version 1.0 released April 18, 2001 Version 1.01 released May 2, 2001 Version 1.02 release May 21, 2001 Version 1.03 release May 29, 2001 This version of sdOffice will operate in demo mode when installed. Demo mode randomly replaces characters with asterisks during read and write operations with sdOffice. There are two licensed modes: Workstation and Server. Workstation mode accepts local connections and one external connection at a time. A local socket connection is where the client connects to 127.0.0.1. DDE is also considered a local connection. Server mode accepts unlimited local and external connections. More detail about license types is provided on our website - see the Licensing Explained article on the sdOffice page. Licenses can be purchased individually, or in packs at a discount. When you order, you get an order number and PIN, and obtain a license key for any given workstation from our website. Details are provided on the order form that is faxed or emailed when you order. A load test was performed writing a small Excel worksheet of 100 rows by 10 columns across a 10BaseT network. The server was a Win2K 667Mhz Pentium 3 machine with 128MB of memory. Base memory usage with the sdOffice server running was about 105MB, and base CPU% flutuated between 0 and 5%, reflecting an idle system. Interestingly, when multiple tasks were launched, they all finished at the same time. Tasks CPU % Memory Usage Total Time All Tasks ----- ----- ------------ -------------------- 1 34 107 7 5 75 115 20 10 85 126 38 Corrections: 4/19/01 - fixed sdrun.bb/sdrun.pv, line 520, to prevent comment references in the middle of lines. 4/20/01 - fixed run-time error 424 when accessing ado from a DDE interface. 5/9/01 - worked around a problem with a socket device (N0) on Visual PRO/5 where client/server synchonization failed due to an incorrect timeout error reported on the channel. This affects the sdofc.bb program, not the sdoffice executable. 5/21/01 - added more flexibility to the Word mergefield command, to allow various internal mergefield code designations and leading spaces in field names. 5/21/01 - changed Word print command to disable background printing, which could result in lost print data if the Word session was terminated before printing was finished. Now printing will finish before control returns and a quit can be issued. 5/21/01 - The printer setup routines in Word and Excel were not working. Due to limitations in the Word and Excel printing capabilities, many of the features that were originally provided are not possible. A new printer setup model has been created, and is reflected in the documentation. In particular, specific printer capabilities such as bin selection and duplex printing can't be supported. New capabilites, such as collation and page range selection, have been added. 5/22/01 - added the 'formats' command to Excel, so multiple column numberformats can be set with a single command. The s_excel3.txt sample has been updated to show this in action. 5/25/01 - added GetRows to Excel to return the number of rows in a worksheet. 5/29/01 - Recompiled with an update to our development environment. This requires that a complete install be performed to upgrade to 1.03, rather than a simple update of just sdofc.exe. Otherwise, supporting DLL and OCX files are out of sync. 5/31/01 - fixed Word tabledef font=name option, which was causing the font to be defined as the default font (usually MS Sans Serif) rather than the named font. 6/1/01 - fixed sdofc.bb/pv to not strip leading spaces from command parameters. 6/5/01 - added setdelim command to the Word object, which sets a non-default delimiter for tablerow and getfields commands. The default delimiter is a tab, which can be represented as the text string \t in tablerow. 6/5/01 - added the getfields command to the Word object, which returns a list of mergefield names in the current document, delimited by the current delimiter. 8/3/01 - corrected sdrun.bb/.pv to not clear the global strings $sdhost and $sdport if the host and port call arguments are null. 11/6/01 - fixed sdofc.bb to work if null data is returned, such as an empty cell in an Excel getdata command with a single cell range. 3/25/05 - Corrected charttype=column to work without generating an error 13. It now generates a 2d clustered column chart. 9/8/05 - Corrected operation of the header option of the Excel sort command. 5/3/06 - Corrected a problem with the Excel fitwidth option. 10/08/07 - Corrected a detail logging issue that could appear if the average length of log lines exceeded 64 bytes, causing an overflow in the text box holding the log entries. The box is designed to hold the last 1000 lines of logging. 06/19/08 - Corrected a system ID calculation issue that could occur in vmware virtual machines hosting sdoffice 1.0. 6/26/08 - Modified the Excel SaveAs command to use generic objects to avoid a runtime error when used with old versions of Excel. 12/4/08 - Modified Word OpenDoc command to use generic objects to avoid problems with older versions of Word. 12/5/08 - Added comdlg32.ocx to distribution, to avoid errors on Vista systems that might not have this control.