Mike Pickus - Using Visual Components' Active X Controls and Integrated Templates

Posted September 1 1997

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Mike's presentations told us about Visual Components ActiveX Controls and Mike's Integrated Templates. He covered these products pretty well, but I was a bit disappointed that he didn't show us exactly how to drop in a template and use it. Still, he covered a lot of material and had a very detailed slide show for a good portion of the presentation.

First, Mike told us a bit about Visual Components, Inc., the company. They were founded in 1993, bought out in 1996 by Sybase, and are "partners" with the following companies/products: Lotus, Micrografx, Corel, Netscape, Borland and Powersoft. Visual Components sells ActiveX Controls, Code Libraries, Source Code and Internet tools. They also sell their products in a suite, which includes the following: Visual Speller for spell checking, First Impression for charting, Formula One for spreadsheet and Visual Writer for text control. This suite is currently being offered for the sale price of $399.00, which Mike told us was a "very good price".

Mike then offered details, comments and recommendations about each of the products.

Visual Speller 2.0

Visual Speller 2.0 includes dictionaries for American and British English, as well as French, German and Italian, and word lists for Dutch and Danish. You can load multiple dictionaries simultaneously, so you're not limited to using just one dictionary. You can create your own dictionaries, too.

First Impression 2.1

This charting tool offers 35 chart types, a chart wizard, photo-realistic rendering and printer, and international language support. Mike shared an interesting tidbit: Microsoft Chart 5.0 is actually a crippled version of First Impression.

Formula One 4.0

This is an Excel-compatible spreadsheet that will read and write Excel 4.0, 5.0 and 7.0 WKS files. Formula One includes HTML formatting and international language support. It also claims to have ODBC and SQL support, which Mike warned is not working.

The Formula One spreadsheet and First Impression charting tools are "highly integrated", according to Mike. He told us that they are coming out with a new version of these tools soon, for a $99 upgrade fee each. The principal difference in the new versions is that they will no longer require Microsoft foundation classes.

Visual Writer 3.0

Mike was very short and to the point about this product - and he got a good laugh. He recommends that you take a look at the RichX product (rather than Visual Writer) for managing text boxes.

GeoPoint 1.1

Mike said this product is the least expensive for this type of product, it's royalty-free, and while it's not the fanciest, the price and lack of royalties are a real plus. If you can live without the extras, it's a great product.

GeoPoint does thematic mapping with MapInfo, Atlas and AutoCad file support. It has legend and shading control, USA state and county boundaries, US highways, major city points, and world countries included.

WebViewer 2.0

Mike's comments here were, again, to the point and appreciated. He said that this product works in 16-bit and is nice, but 32-bit doesn't work.

The WebViewer includes an HTML browser, will display files including GIF and JPEG formats, does client side image maps, handles cookies and bookmarks.

System Tools

This is a third party product, and Mike said, "it works". It includes a system tray, color picker, app bar, popup menu, and is 32-bit.

That's it for the Visual Components tools, now it's time to talk about the templates that work with them.

MAP VisualSpeller Template

First off, YES, it works with RichX! Furthermore, Mike said that it generally takes about 2 minutes to add to your RichX program, as opposed to the whole 10 minutes it generally takes to add this template to your VisualWriter program.

With this template, you can easily handle multiple strings, memos, cstrings and pstrings, multiple standard and custom dictionaries, automatic OCX installation, and even has "all words found" messages. It's supposed to make using VisualSpeller much, much easier. (Unless you LIKE prototyping OCX calls.)

MAP First Impression Template

This template set is made to work with the charting OCX, First Impression. There is an impressive list of things that this template handles. You can merge data into charts, rather like mail merge; use the chart wizard to create new charts - there are over 35 chart types, including titles, legends and formatting. It handles default charts stored as blobs in a TopSpeed file.

You can browse, edit, copy and paste charts; title and footnote fields; preset extensions to select data set; set range and filter; define row and column labels; and track an unlimited number of variables, including calculated local variables.

Interactive decision support and display of merged data and chart are included; you can subset a selection by highest or lowest values; total or count by row or column level; view alternate data sets and charts; dynamically rotate 3D charts; and edit, print, save or load charts.

You can also include charts on Clarion reports (Mike demoed this, and it's cool), dynamically generate WMF files, and have multiple charts on a report.

Mike showed us some of the template features, but he wasn't very clear about where the template ended and the Visual Components product started. Mike's quiet voice would have been better suited to a clip-on microphone. He's certainly knowledgable, though, and his friendly personality showed through an otherwise quiet presentation. I walked away thinking that, when I need these sort of tools, I know where to look first.

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