The following document is useful if you are setting up ACT and ACT for the Web and need to know how to tell your firewall to show ACT as an exception.  It also documents ports that need to be available. Adding Program Exceptions to Windows Firewall for ACT! and SQL Server Click the Windows Start button, click Control Panel Click Administrative Tools, select Windows Firewall with Advanced Features. Note: You will have to complete the following steps for

I was building a report for a client in Excel using an OLEDB connection to the back end data base.  Pretty standard stuff, do it all the time.  From my favorite SQL Query editor tool all was well.  Snap the SQL Select statement into Excel and all I can get is "Initialization failed" and no data. In fact, attempting to get any data (even just from a single table) from this data base gave the same error message. After some fumbling around I realized that we were connecting to the

An Act! CRM data base contains lots of information and getting it out is frequently the problem you have.  So we tend to look at using different reporting tools, or Microsoft Excel, for the extracting or reporting task.  And the way the data is stored in Act! can sometimes make extracting the information the way you want a bit more difficult than it should be.  But if you understand the data base structure and your SQL Select statements you can do it easily. Here is an example. &

I just learned something and thought I'd pass it along to people who are interested in Sage ACT dashboards and viewing them on the web. Behind the scenes, there is an XML file located in the Tools folder under Program Files that controls what templates are available for building dashboards in Sage ACT.  You can create your own SQL commands and embed them in this file by following the instructions at the top of the XML file. Ok, so, if you add this SQL statement to the Act.dashboard.

Starting with ACT version 2012, you can now create some informative Excel pivot tables using what is called a Star schema.  The data goes after histories and opportunities. Two tables are created.  It’s a bit complicated to set up, but once done you can start to do some sophisticated drill downs in Excel to show history records.  Here’s a screen shot of one pivot table I just created. The one below is using the Opportunities table. Here’s what I was able to produce in

Today's blog is about using SQL commands directly in Excel.  I am going after data in Sage ACT, but you can use the same technique to go after a wide variety of data sources that are SQL based. First off, open Excel.  I am showing you screen shots from Excel 2010.  You want to click on the data tab and pick "from other data sources". After choosing From other data sources choose From Data Connection wizard which brings up the following dialog box.  Choose Other

A while ago, I posted a blog article about building CSV's from SQL tables.  It was a very popular post, so I'm submitting it again.  I decided to go research if there were any things to do differently with the new SQL Server 2008. Turns out what I wrote before still applies. What drove me to write the original post was an email from another consultant who wanted to know a way to export SQL queries to CSV files. After I formulated my response to him, I decided it would make a good and