Right out of the box, Panorama is a very flexible program. Its built in menus and tools bring incredible power to your fingertips. In spite of this power, however, Panorama is a general purpose tool. To get the most out of Panorama you’ll want to customize it to meet the specific needs of your business or industry. Doing this takes an up front investment of time and/or money. But if done properly, the payoff can be huge—a tool optimized specifically for running and organizing your business or life, not someone else’s idea of how things should be done. You’ll save time, reduce errors, and look more professional to your customers, vendors, employees and/or supervisors.

Programming Isn’t Magic

If you’ve never programmed before, the idea of programming may seem like magic. But really there’s noth- ing magic about it at all. Programming doesn’t really add any new features or capabilities to Panorama. Anything that can be done with programming can also be done manually with Panorama’s standard menus and tools.

If programming doesn’t add any new features, what is it for? Many database tasks take more than one step to complete. To set up a report, for example, you may need to select certain information, sort the database, and perform calculations. A program allows you to define such a sequence of steps in advance. Once the sequence of steps is defined, you don’t have to perform that sequence of steps manually any more. Simply ask the computer and it will perform the steps for you, flawlessly and at the highest possible speed. This lets the computer do what it does best, remember things accurately, and frees your mind for more important tasks. Eventually you can teach Panorama all the everyday tasks you need for running your organization.

Programming “Tape Recorder”

A great way to start writing simple programs is to let Panorama write the programs for you. Panorama includes a built-in recorder than can automatically write programming code for you as you perform data related tasks in Panorama. As you perform each action, you can actually watch the code write itself. To learn more, see Procedure Recorder.

Learn More

To learn more about programming with Panorama, see these topics:


See Also


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