PerfectTablePlan newsletter 18

Latest version

There is no new release to announce this newsletter. The latest version of PerfectTablePlan is v3.1.4. We recommend you download the latest version to get all the latest improvements and bug fixes.

We are hard at work on the next version of PerfectTablePlan, with lots of new features planned. As always, the new release will be announced first in this newsletter.

The little things

Sometimes the little things can make a big difference. In PerfectTablePlan v3.0.0 we introduced stationery printing. The stationery was always printed in alphabetical order of the guest name. This seemed the most logical and obvious order. We didn't really stop to think about the 1000 seat dinner with Mr A on table 1, Mr B on table 100, Mr C on table 50 etc. Oops. The unfortunate organizers were left to sort 1000 place cards into table order by hand or use a lot of shoe leather. When someone pointed out this (obvious in retrospect) problem we fixed it, adding the Sort by drop-down list at the top of the Stationery pane in v3.1.0. Is there a little change we could make to PerfectTablePlan that would make a big difference to you? If you don't tell us, we won't know.

Crash reports

We know how frustrating it is when software crashes and you lose all your hard work since the last save, so we go to great lengths to prevent PerfectTablePlan crashing. 

Unfortunately it isn't possible to guarantee we have eliminated every possible crash bug in around 100,000 lines of code. So we have added crash reporting to help us trace the cause of any crashes that occur. 

If PerfectTablePlan detects a crash it will attempt to display a window that allows you to email us a report. Please send us the crash report. It only takes a couple of mouse clicks and it doesn't contain any personal information. We do look at every crash report and the information in the report can be a big help to us in tracing and eliminating the crash in the next version.

We also make back-ups of your plan file in the background to reduce the chances of data being lost to a crash or user error.

So far we have only had 3 crash reports from the latest version (v3.1.4) after thousands of downloads.  We think that makes PerfectTablePlan a lot more reliable than most of the other software we use day-to-day. Microsoft eat your heart out!

Oval tables

Customers keep asking us for oval tables. It seems like a reasonable request. People have oval tables and how hard can it be? Very hard actually. Auto-sizing an oval table and arranging seats neatly around it turns out to be a tough mathematical problem. To find out more read this blog post. Oval tables may appear in a future version, if we can crack the mathematics.

Organizational licences

The standard PerfectTablePlan licence is for one named user. This means that organizations need to buy a new licence for each new PerfectTablePlan user (they can't transfer existing licences from staff who have left). We realise this isn't always  convenient, especially for organizations with a high staff turnover, so we do also offer organizational licences. Contact us if you are interested in getting a quote for an organizational licence.

PerfectTablePlan now available on Amazon.com

PerfectTablePlan is now available from Amazon.com through our partner Great Mind Software. We would be very grateful if any readers of this newsletter could spare a few minutes to add a review to our Amazon page.

Seating plan headaches at the G8 summit

According to the Guardian newspaper the seating plan is one of the biggest headaches for organizers of the G8 summit. Certainly the G8 aren't on our illustrious client list (yet).