>Any QB experts here?
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>You may find my white paper and code samples helpful at QuickBooks Automation
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>Gone are the days when we can develop an application using Visual FoxPro alone. Users today are much more sophisticated and expect to be able to use their favorite tools from within the application when it is appropriate. More and more applications are exposing much of their functionality through components which can be automated, including the popular and successful Intuit product "QuickBooks". Your users will thank you for realizing that their time is valuable too when you can automate QuickBooks and make sure that they never again have to enter the same data twice.

The program I have seen users want to use (they're good at that <g>) above all others, by far, is Excel. It is the program they are most familiar with and is how they want to get data into the system. That is often true even when the VFP app has a data entry form to input (and validate!) customers, orders, or whatever. To me this is partly a preference for the familiar and partly an indictment of the functionality of the data entry form. I can't copy part of one record to a new one, I can't see other records at the same time I am doing data entry, etc.

Here is an article I came across the other day from a DevProConnections magazine which was given out at an all day .NET seminar I attended recently. The article is not .NET-specific. It has some great insights IMO. There are some real life examples such as the buttons on fuel pumps and elevators. (Fuel pumps get nailed twice, LOL). It made me think about minor UI details I had probably never given much thought to. Any developer who is involved in UI design will probably not regret the time spent reading it.

http://www.devproconnections.com/article/web-development/the-science-of-great-ui