There are many ways to use your excel data, but what you really need is an Excel to Access converter. Look no further: Spectral Core’s Full Convert can turn this into a manageable job. Even though you have spreadsheets with many worksheets full of data, you have found that you simply cannot link up the spreadsheets and get the analysis that you need to review the position of your business. Not in the way that you want to do it – you have outgrown the abilities of Excel to get you the data in a timely manner in order to make intelligent decisions about the direction of your business. Don’t let your competition outgrow you because they have already begun using a database management system that leaves you in the dust!
You can use our Excel to Access converter and get back to the business of building your customer base and increasing your bottom line. Getting away from the myriad of spreadsheets will allow you to take the reigns of your company once again and make swift moves that keep up with changing technology and market demands. Full Convert will take your data and migrate it into Access, leaving you with more time to work on the business instead of memorizing macros to garner the needed information from Excel.
Any conversion is frightening; after all, if it works don’t fix it. But if you are thinking about using an Excel to Access converter – you have already decided that it’s no longer working. You recognize there are limitations in using spreadsheets to manage your data. These limitations are slowing down your business and your staff – you have maxed out on what Excel can provide for you.
You need to make a change – take that step today. Don’t wait one minute longer, you’ll be glad you made the change!
Converting your database to another platform can be an overwhelming process. Let us help you make it an easy migration, Full Convert by Spectral Core offers a clear and easy solution. Try it today!
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
Tags: access, excel, full convert
In my recently awakened urge to fix our lacking marketing, I came across BitsDuJour, a site promoting products in a pretty unique way – by offering huge discounts for a single day. That way, authors can sell large number of licenses in a single day. While offering huge discount is out of question for most promotions, it does make sense in certain situations.
- Launching a new product is one of such situations, and we will use BitsDuJour to get our new database manager/advanced SQL query tool Rapid Query v1.0 into hands of as many users as quickly as possible. Having hundreds of users of first version of your application is invaluable for feedback you get. You get to know what your customers need right away.
- When you know you will be getting a lot of users. It’s like offering a volume discount.
Paying users are special. They are generally very kind and thankful for all the ways you make their life easier. You want to communicate with customers much more than with prospects – trust me on this. Your customers are always much more dedicated to give you feedback and cooperate in improving your stuff than trial version users. They already crossed the psychological barrier of entering the credit card information, so they are very interested. Also, it is much easier to sell your new products and services to your existing customers than to any other group of your website visitors, so it clearly makes sense to get as many customers as possible. Of course, this applies if you have many related products or services.
BitsDuJour audience are impulse buyers. This means that product must not be too expensive – $20 or so is the optimal price. I decided to offer a full 90% discount on our proven $299+ product, Full Convert Enterprise. So, I will be able to see how many are more inclined to buy when they see they are getting 90% discount compared to 70% discount they will be getting for Rapid Query. In future, I plan to use A/B testing wherever possible, not only on our landing pages.
Full Convert is scheduled on BitsDuJour for March, 13:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/full-convert-enterprise/
If you ever wanted to get an industrial-grade database converter practically for free, that’s your day.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
Tags: Marketing
When you run a business, there are always dozens of things that should be done, but there is never time. We use Plimus here as our payment processor company, so our online shop is hosted on Plimus servers. This proved to be problematic, as we lost all referral information for our orders. This means we had little idea where did our customers come from. And it stayed like this for far too long.
When you are a programmer and customers like your products, it’s easy to fall into trap thinking that improving your business is done 99% by improving the applications. However, that’s not exactly true – even if you have the best software in the world, if it is a niche product, word of mouth isn’t enough to reach the tipping point where ‘everybody knows what you do’. So, it’s crucial to track where do your customers come from, and simply, make that stream as large as you can.
To have as precise analytics as possible, we used asynchronous Google tracking code. So, instead of placing tracking code on the bottom of the page (before </body> tag), it will be placed on the top (right after opening <body> tag). As it is asynchronous code, it doesn’t slow down page loading, but does run earlier than standard tracking code.
Here is the code snippet:
<script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(ga); })(); </script>
Two bolded lines (_setDomainName and _setAllowLinker) are required for cross-domain tracking, and you should replace UA-XXXXX-X with your Google Analytics domain identifier.
Second thing we need to do is to update links to online shop. In addition to normal href tag of the link, we have to add onlick Javascript event to push necessary cookies across domains:
<a href="https://your.shop/url" onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'https://your.shop/url']); return false;">Buy Now</a>
The last thing needed is placing proper tracking script to your shopping cart pages (on domain other than your site). This step is actually probably not needed, as many shops now directly support Google Analytics and you only need to give them your UA-XXXXX-X GA site identifier. I know Plimus, FastSpring, and PayPro support GA natively – and probably many others, too.
In case your shop doesn’t support GA natively, this is not hard. Paste the async tracking code we used above to each page of your shop, right after opening <body> tag. You will probably have a template page in your shop control panel, so you will only need to do it in one place.
Don’t be lazy in a wrong places, as I have been for way too long. You cannot improve what you don’t track – so make sure you know exactly from where your customers come, why do they buy, how many of them downloaded trial, and as much other information you can.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
Tags: Add new tag, Analytics
It took us a while, but SqlTran v1.0 is now officially released!
We changed the name from SQL Translator to SqlTran, as it’s shorter, catchy – and sqltran.com was available. We will use that domain in the future for SqlTran exclusively. As this product will certainly grow, and database migration is so complex due to the differences between different engines – we will need extensive online help, community etc. However, we have so much work still ahead, that this will wait a bit.
SqlTran 1.0 migrates MySQL 5.1 to SQL Server 2008. All older versions are supported, too, of course.
What SqlTran provides is a comfortable database translation. Basically, point it to the source database, tell it which is your target – and it will do the magic. All your tables, views, procedures, functions, triggers – and of course data – are written in the target. What paid professional expert would do manually in weeks or even months, SqlTran does in a few seconds. Cool, eh?
Take a look and tell me what you think about it: www.spectralcore.com/sqltran/
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
We have secretly been working on the complete database translator for quite some time now – over a year. While our existing tool, Full Convert, efficiently migrates tables, data, indexes and foreign keys, it can’t handle procedures, triggers, views, UDTs and other database objects. This turned out to be a burning issue for many of our (potential) customers who need to have their database logic translated, as well as data. As SQL is a verbose language with loose syntax (one thing can be written in many very different ways), analyzing code turned out to be hard. There are not so many tools for that on the market, for obvious reasons.
So, where are we now? We have written lexical and semantic parsers for MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle – with Firebird, PostgreSQL and others to follow. I can tell you, these grammars are huge! Our semantic parser is very fast, it parses hundreds of thousands lines of code in a few seconds, and gives us perfect in-memory object representation of the SQL commands. We have covered most of the statements in each SQL dialect, and consciously skipped some exotic statements that probably not many people use. People are signing up on our beta tester list daily, and I am happy that you will soon be able to test our long-term effort.
How does it work? You will be able to hand over just a SQL script file, and we analyze all the code, show you all objects in a nice tree list, and you can browse both the original and the translated code easily. You can also modify the translated code by hand and we won’t touch that object’s translation (unless you choose to revert to default). You can even refresh the source at any time without losing your manual tweaks. You can also connect to the live source database and we will fetch a definition for each object – the rest is pretty much the same as if you were working with a script.
For output, you can either create a database creation SQL file, or you can connect to your live target database server and have everything moved over seamlessly and test the code logic.
Sign up for notifications or beta testing here: www.spectralcore.com/sqltranslator/
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
I had a terrible experience with VS2008. Although I use a speedy Quad Core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, fast hard drives and a fast graphic card – it took between 5 and 10 seconds to redraw a form in Visual Studio designer. I wasn’t sure if it’s because of the excellent DevExpress components we use for all our .NET products, but it seemed just a bit too much to expect, even from Microsoft.
So, after being fed up with the sluggish VS interface once too much, I googled to see if there is a solution. Guess what? I found it in just a few minutes and am not cursing VS anymore. Because of this issue, at least. 
In short, if your problem is caused by the same thing that slowed me down, just go to Internet Options (either from Control Panel or from IE’s Tools menu) and uncheck the Check for publisher’s certificate revocation* in the Advanced tab, under Security Node section in the tree list.
Read the whole thread here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/bc778e26-9156-4924-a9ca-a57ef8ff6bcc
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
It’s been more than half a year since our last release.
It took us half a year to perfect Full Convert 5 since the last release back in January. So, what’s big in v5.0? In one sentence – it’s faster, more reliable, uses less memory – and supports databases of unlimited size! That’s right, unlimited
Here’s a breakdown of all major changes:
• Full Convert 5 handles databases and tables of the unlimited size
• Improved speed of conversion
• Improved user interface responsiveness
• Reduced memory consumption
• Installation reduced to less than 50% of the original size
• Microsoft .NET Framework is no longer required to run Full Convert
• Improved Excel support and added support for Excel 2007 files as a target
• SQL Server Compact Edition database maximum size increased to 4GB
• Improved user interface to avoid confusion of new users (for example, trying to open a database file instead of project file will now automatically start the new conversion wizard with the correct database info filled-in)
• Added a visual indicator of the slower parameterized mode used for BLOB data
• Added a fast SQL Server detection
• Added support for multiple double-quotes in CSV text files
• Added ‘Test Filter’ button in Table Settings. Use it to see how many records your custom source table filter selects.
• Many bugfixes, of course
I just ran a quick test to see how does it perform. I was converting to MySQL on a local machine, so there was no network lag. For one thing, it’s nice to see it transfer 27 thousand records per second (something competing products can only dream about), but for me it’s even more interesting to look at the Task Manager. We are transferring data in full speed from a million records table, and Full Convert uses 50MB of RAM!
Neat!
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
Tags: database conversion, full convert, mysql, releases
Spectral Core finally has a blog. It is long overdue, but finally it is live.
Expect articles related to our core expertise – databases, of course. I’m planning to write a great deal of pretty general informational posts, but also very specific problem-solving techniques.
As we’re handling 16 database formats with our database converter, and 5 with our data sync product, I have a lot to write about.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.