Jochen Bartlau
Miscellaneous Treats in List & Label 27
As with every version, there are way too many new features in version 27 to cover them all in separate blog posts. So here’s a quick summary of some of the rather hidden gems that still deserve some attention.
New Features for the Excel Export
After paying some attention to the PDF export in version 26, we decided to give some love to the Excel export in version 27, by adding three often requested features.
Creating Charts via Drag & Drop
List & Label’s chart dialog offers a load of possible customizations. However, as always, with great power comes great complexity. Even creating a simple pie chart could have taken some time if you’re not yet familiar with List & Label’s chart features. As you can already easily create crosstabs via Drag & Drop, and we just recently improved the table’s drag & drop features, offering a thorough D&D support for charts was the next logical step on our path to a simpler, more intuitive end user desktop designer.
No More Printer Driver Dependency: The New Printerless Mode in List & Label 27
This was a huge issue, that has been bugging us for years. While – generally speaking – List & Label’s level of printer control is unmatched by any competitor I know of, we always required a printer driver in order to execute this control. On the desktop, that’s all fine and well, as Microsoft conveniently provides the XPS Document Writer and – in more recent versions of Windows OS – the Microsoft PDF Writer. Those are always present and accessible. However, on the web and in the cloud, it’s a different story.
Revisiting C# Script Performance
This is another often overlooked feature – you can add scripts to your projects and use your favorite language to do so. Since a couple of versions already, List & Label supports C# Scripts. However, the performance was less than perfect, making it a good choice for complex calculations but not so much for using it on a line-to-line base. In List & Label 26, we were able to push the performance quite remarkably – now using scripts is perfectly feasible.
Vastly Improved PDF Export
PDF is by far the most important export format and one of the targets virtually every user is actually working with. Over the years, we've employed a number of different SDKs and versions of these SDKs in order to write decent PDF files. While the results were excellent already for "normal" cases, there were a couple of restrictions in more advanced scenarios. This has changed in version 26.
Results of the List & Label Survey 2021
Thanks to all participants for taking the time to answer our questions. One thing that I can say straight away: your time was well invested. Your feedback has given us many good ideas and suggestions on how we can further improve List & Label and which new features and technologies are important to you. We do not want to withhold the results, so here are your answers from the survey.
Supporting Multi-Page, Poster or Scaled Print
This is a feature many, yet not all printer drivers offer out-of-the-box. As we kept seeing requests to support this directly – here we go. List & Label 26 enables a thorough support for multi-page printing.
Miscellaneous Treats in List & Label 26
As with every version, we have included a number of minor bells and whistles into the latest version. The most notable ones are:
