Jochen Bartlau 
As we're starting internal discussions and meetings and the first LL21 sprint is getting in shape I wanted to share this photograph, the result of a two hour meeting between the two guys that are sometimes called "Mr. List & Mr. Label" internally – our Senior Architect Christian Kaiser and myself.
We always try to implement new features as visible as possible. However, sometimes features are less discoverable or self explaining than we'd hope for – we're steadily working on that. Here are three very useful features you might have overlooked so far.
In version 20 you see the debut of a brand new Designer object: the checkbox. This object is used to indicate if a boolean value (a condition) is met or not. Think of visualizing the availability of a product, the selected menu in a hotel etc. And the OLE object just got a major overhaul.
List & Label 20 is quickly hitting the final milestones. I've been blogging about the new features since spring. This time, however, I'd like to share some insights into what happens as we shift near RTM.
In the last version we introduced a number of interactive features like report parameters, expandable regions, and dynamic sortings. Until version 20, using these in a web application was not possible as they result in a partial rerendering of the report or – for drilldown reports – trigger a brand new report. As the existing viewers didn't have a communication channel to a server control, this rerendering was impossible.
Enter the new HTML5 viewer. This viewer is designed to work in almost any web browser. It is optimized for mobile devices and supports interactivity. It requires ASP.NET on the server side but can use any operating system on the client.
The improvement of our support for .NET has been a major focus in our feature planning process since the initial .NET beta release in early 2001. As more and more IDE vendors adopt CLR support for their languages and join the .NET community, .NET has become ever more important. Thus, version 20 will feature a wide range of new .NET features that make List & Label even more versatile when using it with CLR languages.
Through a cooperation with REA, a renown vendor of barcode verifiers, we were able to grade and improve our barcodes according to the usual ISO standards. Amongst other optimizations we completely changed the rendering algorithm to optionally match the bars exactly to the device pixels, eliminating all rounding effects this way. Typically, at least a grade of "B" is required by barcode consuments. This should now be easily achievable on typical hardware.
The Ribbon interface has been adapted to Redmond's latest UI style. It now supports the Office 2013 flat icon style and thus blends nicely with modern applications. For those who really need it, we still ship the "old" interface in a sepatate resource file that can be used instead of the default.
This has been a customer request that kept coming back over and over again – “please add the possibility to export to more formats from the preview window”. The typical workflow obviously is to check the result in the preview first. If all is well then an export to the final format is triggered. In List & Label 20 we now have added the possibility to export to the formats that were requested most – Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and XHTML. These formats were added to the already existing PDF, Text and Image formats.
From the perspective of an Office User, this was one of the major missing features in List & Label so far. In Microsoft Excel, for example, you often find yourself styling cells to resemble a headline. The workflow here is to just style one cell and then use the format painter tool for the other cells. This saves a remarkable amount of time. In List & Label, you could have used a multi selection of fields, however if you forgot (or – behold – didn't know) this feature, you'd find yourself repeating the same formatting steps again and again. And if you wanted to transfer the format of a whole object – e.g. a chart with all the fonts, colors, background settings etc. – there was no workaround to a huge lot of work. Enter the format painter tool…
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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