Difference between Pro and Standard

[mlb24]

What is the difference between the Monarch Pro and Monarch Standard Edition? My company is thinking of purchasing this software. We currently are running on a DOS system. We can print information to a text file, and we are hoping we can use Monarch to form reports, and to extract particular data. (Strip off all the funky stuff) We are also hoping to extract particular data from our text files and put it into an access database. Is Monarch worth buying for this purpose? Any input would be great.

[Melissa2]

Monarch is absolutely worth the cost of the program. We have saved many times the cost of the program in man hours (and frustration). We use the Pro version, but unfortunately we are only on version 5.02. (hopefully upgrading soon) The cool thing about Monarch is that you can automate many tasks and your time is better spent analyzing the data instead of entering the data into your program to analyze it.

Melissa

[Steve Caiels]

I agree with Melissa the product is great value. (But then I do work for Datawatch Europe!!!) :D

The Standard version will do the job you talk about, but it is worth considering Pro for the following main benefits.
1. The Join Database Function. This allows you to combine data already held in a database format to your report data.
Example: You have a stock report with stock number and current stock level. You have an Access database with stock number, min qty to hold in stock and a supplier name. With Pro you can open the stock report, join the access table and generate a stock required list by supplier. you can join most popular file formats (XLS,MDB, CSV and lots more)

2. You can open HTML files. This may not be useful for you at the moment as the reports come from dos as a text file. But if you have customers or suppliers that publish reports to a website, Monarch Pro will probably be able to open.

I hope this gives you the info you need.
Steve

[ September 19, 2002, 05:03 AM: Message edited by: Steve Caiels ]

[helpless]

We purchased pro so that we could use the dbase join functions. It has saved so much time!!! Once you create your model (template) you just run it and get the data.!!!!

[Stephen Reid]

I would probably go for the Pro version if I was to purchase another copy. I purchased the standard edition because at the time the extra functionality with Pro didn't appeal to me. Since purchasing I have had several occassions where I just wished I had bought Pro. :(

Oh Well, nevermind ;)
Stephen

[Viv]

I have recently upgraded to 6.01 Pro which I use with Data Pump. I extract data out of various different legacy systems along with some modern odbc ones - for this, Pro is the version to have because it is ODBC compliant (and allows me to do the whole job in Monarch, rather than just part of it). My company bought it but, it is so good, I probably would have bought it myself, otherwise. :D

[ October 03, 2002, 07:29 AM: Message edited by: Viv ]