Python Programming On Win32

Business Requirements

Doubletalk’s obvious goal is to produce a complete set of management accounts. These will almost certainly include company logos, repeating page headers and footers, several different text styles, and charts and tables.

It would be highly desirable to view the output onscreen and keep it in files. This makes for a faster development cycle than running off to the printer and means you can email a draft to the marketing department for approval or email the output to your customers.

Most important, it should be possible for users (sophisticated ones, at least) to customize the reports. Everyone in business needs custom reports. Companies who buy large client/server systems often have to invest time and training in learning to use a report-design tool. Systems that don’t allow custom reporting either fail to give their customers what they need, or (with better marketing) generate large revenues for the consulting divisions of their software houses to do things the customer could have expected for free.

If we can find a general solution that works from Python, the users are automatically in charge of the system and can write their own report scripts. This is a compelling selling point for a commercial application.