Way off topic but . . .

[DougSilver]

I figured that some of the diehards here who stick with Sidekick might also be sticking with other old software. The software in question is Delrina PerformPro which was a pretty slick form designer back in the day. As with my SKW2 PerformPro worked well until the latest computer upgrade at work to Win7-64. Just like SKW2 there is NO way that PerformPro will run on this machine and there are a bunch of forms I designed way back when for special purposes that I occasionally like to update.

I tried on my Win7 machine at home which is 32-bit and PerformPro works just fine. The downside is that I lost the install disks so am not properly installing the program but what I did was just copy the entire program directory from my work machine and things seem okay.

Is there anyone out there with experience with PerformPro or other similar software? I guess the best solution is to find some new form designer that can read the old PerformPro frp files.

Anyone?

Doug

 

[james33]

Hi Doug

The only idea I have for this, is that you could install a pdf printer and see if you can print the form to that.
I'm not sure how it would work, as I am not familiar with the program you mention, but after checking out the following page I can see that it is used for form filling onscreen, so maybe that suggestion I made would not be relevant.

http://www.zisman.ca/Articles/1991-92/Input_May92.html

You could possibly edit it in Adobe using the placement of the text fields ?
Just a thought.

Good Luck !

Jim

 

[DougSilver]

Jim,

The thing is that there was a subsequent program (JetForm, FormFlow?) that could import the xxxx.FRP files generated by PerForm but I cannot find older versions of those programs. In fact I think FormFlow 2.22 had a feature specifically intended to import FRP files. I have not been able to find any program that could read the FRP files and Adobe does not recognize them either. I have already printed some of the forms to PDF format on the computer that is able to run Perform and I can open the PDF in Adobe or any reader but it is not really an easily editable form in that format.

Probably trying to get a later form designer program that is able to import the old FRP files is the way to go if I really want to pursue this but I have not had much luck finding older versions of Jetform or FormFlow.

Doug

 

[james33]

Dear Doug,
Any chance that you could export them from Delrina PerformPro in a format that would allow you to import them into an older version of Access first and then save them in a format that would be available to another form editor?
Found some info on Delrina
Here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetForm

"With Microsoft's release of Windows 3.11, Indigo Software did a major enhancement to the forms software and re-branded it JetForm. The JetForm forms product was very successful, and Indigo Software's consulting work also began to focus on work associated with the JetForm software. Given the popularity of the forms software, Indigo Software made a decision to rename the company JetForm.

Its eponymous series of products directly competed against other electronic forms software, such as Delrina's PerForm, and FormFlow products.

In September, 1996, Symantec, which had bought Delrina the previous year, sold their Electronic Forms Division to JetForm. JetForm continued to develop the FormFlow series of products under its own name.

Around this time, JetForm bought the naming rights to the Ottawa Baseball Stadium, naming it "JetForm Park".

On September 13, 2001, JetForm changed its name to Accelio. Accelio was acquired by Adobe Systems in April 2002. The electronic forms products were officially retired in 2004. Adobe marketed JetForm as Adobe Central Output Server [1], without any major changes. Adobe's successor for the JetForm technology was released June 7, 2007, as Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES)[2], part of the Adobe LiveCycle suite.

JetForm Rises Again, In 2007 two of the original founders Tom Hicks, Wayne Hall and four of the core software developers of JetForm Central came together to build a new enterprise class document designer, merge engine, presentation and delivery system. The software is called DocOrigin (a play off the Origin of Documents). DocOrigin was first released in 2009 and in 2013 version 3.0 was released."

Jim

 

[james33]

Plus PCMag says:

http://books.google.ie/books?id=Xb5...wCQ#v=onepage&q="Delrina Perform Pro"&f=false

Jim

 

[DougSilver]

Perform was a great program for the time and pretty unique. My use of the program was not all that sophisticated. All I wanted to do was design some nice forms that I could use related to my work but I never used the more powerful Filler feature of the program. So I have about a half dozen forms that I like using (still) but every so often would tweak them a bit (really more cosmetic reasons but occasionally to make them more usable). Consequently I would use the program maybe a couple of times a year to do any tweaking that came to mind. I guess I can still do that at home on my Win 7 32-bit machine but it irks me that decent programs I have used for years (way past their "shelf-life") have overnight become unusable with my new machine at work.

Doug

 

[james33]

Everything changes and nothing remains the same!
It is a consequence of our age, that we know how the job can be done and we know that we can do it well.
The tools we used, even if mildly inefficient, did the job adequately.
Other people come in and they feel they know better........
One day they will be on the receiving end of the same attitude and like you and I, will be asking the same questions.
The reason things get changed Doug, is that we live in a capitalist system, firms make more money if people keep having to upgrade.
It's called maintaining a revenue stream!
Sad, and in an ideal world totally unnecessary......

Good luck
Jim