Re: AskSam: No picklist?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3898

Posted by stephenz
2005-08-25 08:47:38

Peter,

I have had a license for askSam for years, even upgraded to the new version, more out of habit than anything, I guess. It inevitably disappoints me. Your intitial reaction, that it isn’t nearly as versatile as Zoot, is also my experience. What sets it apart from most info-manager databases, is that you can choose to create fields or not. If you create fields, you can then print tabular reports, which is not possible with most of the hierarchical databases we discuss… although, you can do so with Zoot. Nevertheless, even the reporting function in askSam seems rather weak. I do keep some data in askSam and when I need to print it, I actually output it to a CSV file (which it does pretty well), then open that file in Excel.

Also, the $89 price is for the non-pro version. This version does not include the indexing that makes askSam fairly powerful. I got the same promotional e-mail, and I believe they are also offering a major discount on the pro version, which is usually $400, but in this offer is $195. If you decide you want to use askSam, definitely spring for the pro version.

Steve Z.

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