Creating Charts via Drag & Drop

Drag and Drop for Donut Chart

List & Label’s chart dialog offers a load of possible customizations. However, as always, with great power comes great complexity. Even creating a simple pie chart could have taken some time if you’re not yet familiar with List & Label’s chart features. As you can already easily create crosstabs via Drag & Drop, and we just recently improved the table’s drag & drop features, offering a thorough D&D support for charts was the next logical step on our path to a simpler, more intuitive end user desktop designer.

No More Printer Driver Dependency: The New Printerless Mode in List & Label 27

App to the Cloud with LL 27

This was a huge issue, that has been bugging us for years. While – generally speaking – List & Label’s level of printer control is unmatched by any competitor I know of, we always required a printer driver in order to execute this control. On the desktop, that’s all fine and well, as Microsoft conveniently provides the XPS Document Writer and – in more recent versions of Windows OS – the Microsoft PDF Writer. Those are always present and accessible. However, on the web and in the cloud, it’s a different story.

Revisiting C# Script Performance

This is another often overlooked feature – you can add scripts to your projects and use your favorite language to do so. Since a couple of versions already, List & Label supports C# Scripts. However, the performance was less than perfect, making it a good choice for complex calculations but not so much for using it on a line-to-line base. In List & Label 26, we were able to push the performance quite remarkably – now using scripts is perfectly feasible.

Making-of: Web Report Designer in Development Part I

The rapidly increasing number of web apps has led to a great demand for web-based reporting solutions. We followed this trend with List & Label, and moved the Designer to the web – from version 27 on. One huge benefit, brought by the new Designer: way less effort, because only one front- and back-end needs to be developed and subsequently maintained. Naturally, the development of the new Web Report Designer presented us with technical challenges which we’d like to share with you – maybe knowing about our own learning curve is going to help you with your own projects, too.

Vastly Improved PDF Export

PDF is by far the most important export format and one of the targets virtually every user is actually working with. Over the years, we've employed a number of different SDKs and versions of these SDKs in order to write decent PDF files. While the results were excellent already for "normal" cases, there were a couple of restrictions in more advanced scenarios. This has changed in version 26.