“Bob on the Service Desk” neglected to mention that Cinch is going into beta testing next week and is expected to be released a few weeks after that. He will be punished severely for his error.
Users of TheFormTool PRO have enjoyed 16 major upgrades and assorted updates as well as scores of largely transparent bug fixes.
The biggest of them – the introduction of two dozen Math features and the original logic functions contained in Derived Answers a few months later – were groundbreaking. They elevated TheFormTool from merely great document automation software to a new level, a tool to create “intelligent documents” able to mimic the thinking of the expert who created them.
Today, we’re announcing TheFormTool PRO v2.5, aptly nicknamed “Cinch.” Cinch fits perfectly the two leading definitions of its name: It really is a sure thing. It really is simple to use.
Just as the Math and Logic upgrades increased TheFormTool’s power dramatically, easily by magnitudes of ten or more, so too with Cinch. More than that, Cinch will open new vistas of unintended benefits, where users around the world create unforeseen uses for its amazing features and for TheFormTool itself.
What’s new?
Start with the power of true Boolean logic. Even users who skipped out early from math classes will easily master AND/OR/XOR conditions and be able to chain them for extraordinary results.
Then there’s the relational functions made possible by GRID. GRID brings a horizontal aspect to TheFormTool’s Q & A Table, making it easy to ask for and provide related information. A list of names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails is arranged compactly and clearly. Or a list of products with SKU, name, type, location, price, and product family. Each data point can be individually addressed, called up, or aggregated so that a user could include only married recipients, with children, living in Idaho. Or, an agreement could call for signature blocks based on the titles of those individuals called to sign for the companies involved. A sales contract could specify the sales tax for each location, vary pricing by country or currency, or even change the emphasis of a communication based on the type of business to which it is sent.
With Cinch it’s easy to extract a sublist of items from a List or GRID. For example, if a GRID contains names, genders, and birth dates, a finished form could include a list of adults, a list of females, or a list of people who share a particular surname.
Cinch’s logical operators (AND/OR/XOR) allow easy creation of compound conditions. For instance: include this paragraph if the account balance is over limit AND the due date has passed OR the client is in bankruptcy. Compound conditions can also be applied to the creation of sublists: include each listed infraction that has a penalty over the threshold AND has not been remedied AND falls under a particular statute.
All the power in the world isn’t worth much if it isn’t simple to understand and simple to use. This has always been one of TheFormTool’s central features and a core belief driving its development. Not only does Cinch achieve this goal with its new features, in Cinch some of TheFormTool’s existing features have become even easier to operate. The Field/List/Condition screen (the main workhorse of form creation) has received an overhaul. A user will now be able to set all aspects of a field or list or condition in a single pass, and every type of field/list/condition can be re-edited and fine-tuned at any time.
For existing users, we’ve even included a button to automatically convert Lists to GRIDs.
Cinch is TheFormTool’s most feature-rich enhancement ever and is its most powerful upgrade ever. Not only does Cinch set a new standard for today, it also provides one of the three stepping stones necessary for the introduction of “Sequel,” our codename for a truly incredible new product to be announced later this year that will absolutely rock for document assembly and forms automation.
Like all 16 previous updates and upgrades, Cinch is free to all current owners of TheFormTool and remains priced at $89 per user for new purchases.
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