If you haven't experimented with it yet, take a closer look at VIP Professional's Views feature.

Views allow you to fully customize the display for just about any grid-type listing in VIP Professional. You can choose what columns to display, the default sort order, whether or not to group columns, how wide columns are, what font and colors are used, and dozens more characteristics.

This isn't just about appearances -- Views can completely change how you work with VIP Professional. For example, you can have a View in the Reservations Manager that shows you the core details about your reservations. Another View might focus on financial details. Another might focus on the operational details. And so on. You can have as many Views as you want and easily toggle between them depending on what you need to do at that moment.

Also, many reports in VIP Professional are based on the current View -- essentially, any of the pre-defined reports that have "(Dynamic)" in its name is based on the current View (as well as the current Filter). Thus, if you are looking at the Reservations Manager, the Reservations Listing Report (Dynamic) will generate a report that uses the same columns, column order, fonts, and so on as shown on the screen. That's a handy way of getting completely different reports quickly and easily.

VIP Professional comes with many Views pre-defined for you. However, you can easily create your own Views or customize the ones we've provided. Just open the Views Lookup by clicking the lookup button next to the drop-down listing:

That displays the Views Lookup:

Then either create a new View or edit an existing one:

Experiment with the View editor a bit to see what it can do. The main thing to keep in mind is that each column can have its own settings. Plus, there are many settings that apply to the overall View. Try different settings and see how they work together -- they are very powerful and very flexible. You can do a lot with them.

Also, keep in mind that Views can be Public or Private.

A Public View is available to all of your users. A Private View is available just to the person who 'owns' that View (the user to whom the View is assigned). This is very handy as it allows different users to have Views that suit their own personal needs, without cluttering up the View lists of other users (simply by setting personal Views to "Private"). Yet you can also share important or standard Views with all users (simply be setting standard Views to "Public").

Creating a custom report in VIP Professional is easy with the recently added "Custom Reports Builder" feature.

The Custom Reports Builder allows you to create report templates that you can save and then use just as you would any other report within VIP Professional - even attaching them to notifications.

To access the Custom Reports Builder, select it from the File menu:

This will open the lookup list of custom reports. Click the Add button to open the Custom Report Builder itself.

General information about the report template is shown at the top of the dialog. This is where you can specify the report template's name, its scope ('Private' if it is only for the assigned user, 'Public' if it is for all users), the type of the report, etc.

The Report Type allows you to choose either Tabular (rows and columns that are pre-defined), Dynamic (rows and columns based on the current grid settings), and Sectional (a report built from one or more pre-defined sections).

The Page Setup tab contains settings affecting the page orientation, size, and margins.

The Header / Footer tab contains settings for both a header and a footer that will appear on every page of the report. You have full control over the formatting of the header and footer.

TIP - right-click on one of the header / footer fields to see a list of merge codes you can insert into the field to generate dynamic text. For example, you can include the current user's name in the header / footer - this gets updated whenever the report is run to show the current user at that time. Additional merge codes and pre-defined headers / footers are available from the drop-down menu associated with each field.

The Report Title tab contains settings for an optional report title. As with headers / footers, you can right-click on a field to display a context menu of available merge codes.

The Content tab contains the details on what, exactly, you want to include in your report template. This tab changes depending on what Report Type you've selected in the top section of the dialog.

You can click on the Preview button to see what your reports will look like with the current settings:

Once you are satisfied with your report template, click "OK" to save it.

Now, any time you want to run the report, you can select it from the Print menu (though the report will only be listed if it is available for the current module -- if you are looking at the Reservation Editor, you won't see a custom report showing you all the guests in the guest directory!).

And that's it! We hope you find the Custom Reports Builder handy. If you have feedback on this feature, or suggestions on how we can make it better, please let us know.

Our latest update, released on 04 June 2008, adds the ability for you to export any report to PDF format.

To use the feature, simply click on the 'Export to PDF' button on the toolbar of the Print Previewer:

This will pop up a standard 'save file' dialog. Select the directory where you want to save the file, give it a unique name (or accept the default name), and that is it.

While VIP Professional already supported PDF reports for notifications and confirmations / reminders, this 'Export to PDF' feature allows you to manually generate PDF reports without having to use a notification. This is mainly useful in two situations:

1. When you want to manually email the report to someone (rather than use a notification).
2. When you want to save copies of all reports in an 'archive' directory (for example, to have a 'printed' copy of booking reports saved into each client's directory).

We hope you find the feature handy. If you have any suggestions on additional features -big or small- don't hesitate to let us know!

We've been getting a lot of great feedback on the merge codes available in VIP Professional. Clearly, merge codes are a very, very popular feature.

We are planning on dramatically expanding the range and scope of merge codes available to you -- and to making them even more flexible. Some of what we are working on includes:

• Building in an import / export capability. This is a highly requested feature and one we've had in our development 'roadmap' for a long time. This will allow us to post new templates for you, of course, but more importantly it means that you can use 3rd-party templates (sharing those from other users, from your designers, and ones we created).
• Adding support for functions. For example, an 'if' function would allow you to say "if the Reservation Type is a 'Private Party' insert some party-related text, otherwise insert some other, generic, text". Another function might allow you to control the formatting of information (such as a date), or to filter the information in a listing (such as inserting a listing of reservations that have more than 30 guests). Functions will dramatically change the way you can use VIP Professional's notifications and confirmations / reminders. What is already a strong marketing tool will become even more capable - stay tuned on this one; we think you'll like it!
• Adding support for snippets -- pieces of text that you can create (including more merge codes, if desired) that are inserted by the merge code. For example, you might create a snippet to be used as the footer for every message you create. This allows you to update all the footers in all of your templates by making a single change, in one place. Another snippet might have sales blurbs that can be used in multiple message templates. And so on.
• Adding more 'summary' merge codes -- we get a lot of positive feedback about how much you like being able to create your own reports interactively and having them automatically circulated. We're looking to add a lot more functionality to the summary codes.
• And much more -- there's a lot to do!

There is no timeline on any of the above yet. Once we're close, we'll announce more details.

What merge-related features interest you? What would you like us to add? Let us know -- your feedback would be very much welcomed.