>Is thate an easy way to create a standard VFP report and then put it in come RTF or other format that can then be attached to an email and read by a recipient in a standard WP or other tool? Say MS Word? How about HTML?
>
>Thanks.
I have been researching this for a while and can give you my results.

My criteria was:
a) Low cost as it was going to several offices & users
b) Had to work on all our machines - Win95, Win98, WinNT 4.0
c) Needed to be universal - not tied to one word processor or browser
d) Had to be readable and printable by all our users.
e) My reports were already designed and implemented so could not require a rewrite.

1) Fox2Word = Works well and is free. Only produces word files and only works with Win95 (I think I am a little fuzzy about that. It was one of the first
ones I rejected as I am on NT). So, didn't meet all of my criteria but was a good product.

2) HotMail = Worked fine but did not compress the files and made a picture out of each page. So, for some of my large reports this would hit the ISPs size limit and the users patientce limit.

3) Crystal Reports = Excelent option, worked perfectly and allowed direct email from report but I would have had to rewrite all my reports in this format.

4) Adobe Acrobat = No rewrite needed. eMail directly from report. Slow to load software with no "Working" message. Expensive as each machine producing reports needs a copy of Acrobat.

5) I tried a PCL to PDF converter component but they also wanted a large royalty on each writting machine. It had you install a standard HP4 pcl printer driver, set to print to a file (no control over name at runtime), and it converted the file to a PDF which you could then email. I didn't like the extra printer install and the royalty.

6) Amyuni PDFPrinter = This was my eventual choice ( which I am still working on and fixing the last of the problems ). $800 one time distribution license. Expensive but cheaper than Acrobat and a one time expense. Creates a PDF compressed file by making a printer on demand. The file is then attached to an email using any of various processes ( I am using MapiMsg ). The users can read and print the file using the free Acrobat Reader. The component comes with an FLL file that you can call with a SET LIBRARY TO ..... command. Thus, I don't have to fool with DLLs. At the present time I am having one last problem with it. When I compiled it to an exe and sent it to my test Win95 machine it bombed with a "can't access printer spooler" error. I am presently trying to bug spray that one.

I have not looked at the flashcreative solution mentioned so I can't help you there.

Hope this helps

Terry