by: Serdar Yegulalp
These two packages together cover everything the average Windows user will require, and afford the most power to users in a basic Windows-platform workgroup.
PerForm's data fields come with discrete text labels. Selecting the text tool and left-clicking on the data field allows you to edit the label. Right-clicking on the field brings up various property sheets (fonts, alignment, box appearance and so forth) for the label, frame and underlying data.
PerForm's tear-off toolbars work in an interesting way. At first, only one toolbar is visible at a time, but there's a list-box control on the left side of the toolbar that allows you to select a toolbar. Grabbing that toolbar and tearing it off, however, reveals another one beneath it. It's a little like a spring-loaded tray stack in a cafeteria--another pops up whenever you pull one off. It takes some practice to get toolbars to snap off and snap back into place at the top.
These tear-off bars have an abundance of useful utilities. For instance, you can use the math bar to build sophisticated equations and link them to a specific field. You can also customize the toolbars by adding or removing buttons.
Right-clicking on a field or object brings up an option menu. You can change an object's appearance, its front-to-back position on the form or its type. Right-clicking on the form itself allows you to edit the underlying form's attributes as well. Object appearance also governs things like data masks, border and line styles, and shading (which can be uniform or graduated).
Text attributes like font styles and sizes, italics, and boldfacing can be mixed and matched in a single text label by choosing the Font toolbar, marking up the appropriate text and indicating the changes on the toolbar. Assign attributes across multiple objects by group-selecting them and then making whatever changes you want.
One feature not seen in other programs is a live window (which can be hidden) that keeps a running list of the tab order of all a form's fields. You can indicate the tab order by number labels on the fields themselves. Changing the sort order is simple. Just pick a field from the list and drag it to the appropriate position in the sort list. Also, a set of buttons--labeled "Sort Top-Down," "Sort Left-Right" and "Sort By Object Order"--allows the user to change the sort order on demand.
Push buttons--flush left or right, or centering, for example--allow for quick positioning of on-screen objects. However, the push buttons simply supply the correct coordinates for the object, instead of making the object automatically stay justified when you make changes to the form. Also, object types can be converted into other object types, although incompatible data, like a picture turned into text, gets lost.
As in JetForm 4.0, there's an object library, which lets you create objects, groups of objects or even whole forms and save them to a central database from which you can recall and reuse them. This is great for achieving document consistency, especially when you use logos, or headers are used consistently across forms. Objects, or collections of objects, can also be repeated across pages, locked or rendered invisible at print time.
As in desktop publishing programs like QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker, objects on a form can be stacked and sorted front-to-back. Even the commands are familiar--Send to Front and Bring to Back. This is a useful way to set up objects to be hidden and revealed later on demand. Other handy, DTPish features concern picture objects, which can be force-fit, scaled or factor-scaled to fit into frames of any dimension.
Info File
Delrina PerForm 3.0
Price: $129
In Brief: One of the stars of this roundup, and the ideal choice for the individual user. This smartly designed program makes it easy to get good-looking results.
Delrina Corp.
800-268-6082,408-363-2345