Soft Skills, Inc - Additional Documents

Soft Skills Inc: Examples of What We've Done

Crystal Reports - Two Challenges:

Over the years, I have had many opportunities to provide training and consulting for Crystal Reports going all the way back to V6. There were two rather
unique and unusual (which, I guess, defines uniqueness) situations I worked on:

MS Project Reporting: MS Project provides many embedded reports. However, the client's reporting needs surpassed the capabilities of those reports
or any customization that could be done within the native MS Project environment. Crystal Reports was an obvious solution. One problem surfaced very
early. The client did not own or want to purchase the MS Project Server. In researching the situation, I discovered that in Project 2003, the default file
format that MS Project uses could be changed to MS Access. By analyzing the schema, I was able to easily create and teach the client how to create and
modify these reports.
Multifunctional Use: The client was collecting some customer data including payment information in Act and needed to generate reports and export
information in QuickBooks. With the creation of an Excel workbook that acted as a giant lookup table for the Act database, the reports were able to be
generated. Crystal Reports was also used to create an if file (QuickBooks import file) to transfer data between Act and QuickBooks.

Office 2007 Transition Training:

The client was transitioning from Office 2003 to Office 2007. I provided 2 hour sessions to introduce the features. More important was the anxiety reducing
nature of the training I provided.

Not Ready Yet:

The client was a small non-profit organization that could not implement the training or upgrading to computerized accounting because their systems were
loaded with viruses and spyware. I fixed that in my role as tech support and was able to do the job.

To Contact Us:

Soft Skills, Inc.
7 Brucewood Road
Acton, MA 01720
Phone (978)549-5230
Fax: (978)477-0525
Contact: David Thrope
dthrope@softskillsnow .com