Everyone loves screenshots!

Screenshot Supporting #2

 

Screenshot Supporting #1

 

Screenshot Supporting #3

 

Innovative Productus LLC

Software Solutions Division

We know first hand, the pressures of being a show chairperson, and have created solutions to make your life easier.

The way that we tackle my software solutions is quite different than the typical software you may have seen.  Here are some of our philosophies about what software solutions should be:

1. The learning curve should be very low, and use common software that most people feel comfortable with. There is nothing more aggravating than being a novice and trying to work with a program that was created by a programming genius from India.

2. Software should be intuitive for the novice user. It should be clean to read, clean to understand, plenty of directions, and should follow the natural progression of starting in the top left corner and working your way to the bottom right corner, just like reading a book. We often see too much clutter on software which makes our eyes glaze over with options. Simple is truly better.

3. As many things as possible should be automated for convenience, yet there needs to be flexibility for end users to customize things.

4. The price needs to be reasonable enough to afford to purchase it, use it, learn it, and terminate it. We are often reluctant to buy $100+ software because of this.

5. We do not enjoy spam emails, offers for upgrades or new products, and I doubt that you do as well. With Excel, your security patches come automatically.

 

PLATFORM—

We use Microsoft Excel as the platform for just about ALL of our document needs, and therefore, you will need at least a basic knowledge of  Excel to utilize these programs.  If you are new to Excel, we suggest taking a non-credit course at your local community college as being the easiest and cheapest way to get knowledge about working with Excel.  If you own a Microsoft Excel version, be careful to note what year version it is.  Excel has made many good advances for users starting in 2000.  We use a 2003 version and it is much better than what we started off with, so if you are using older version, please consider upgrading to get the most out of these programs and others.

 

WHAT OUR MAGICAL SOFTWARE DOES—

We are always hesitant to buy new software because they never tell us in layman terms how it is going to benefit us, so here are some generalities:

1. There are always multiple sheets on these programs. Some sheets you will only see, and some will be given to others, such as customers, dealers, speakers, demonstrators, etc.

2. The sheets that are given to dealers, speakers, and demonstrators will automatically have the headings formatted so there is less of a chance for mistakes.  While the body of many pages is completely changeable, once it is changed on the first page, it will repeat itself on other pages, so if you have 100 dealers at your shows, you will have 100 cover-letters that are all addressed separately to the 100 dealers, but the body of all the messages will generally be the same, unless you choose to customize a sheet to a particular dealer.

3. The sheets are all made that if you enter the recipient’s name in once, it will print it out on many other pages. Besides names, addresses, phone numbers, and the like, all then get used many times over.  To put this in perspective, when a show date is entered once on the Show Planning Made Easy! software,  it can be used a thousand times over on different sheets. That is a lot of time savings as well as reducing the amount of typo errors that always occur when sending correspondences and contracts.

4. Initial customization of your software will take at least 4 hours, unless you are completely proficient with Excel.  Once you have it tweaked the way you like it, changes then take place in a matter of minutes!  Once again to use an example:  For last year’s rounds’ of letters and contracts with my show chair position, I spent at least a total of 40 hours on my small 10 dealer show.  I was also dismayed to see that I still had many errors of show dates and typos that slipped through my proofreading, thus making for a challenging read.  This year, with the software, I was able to do my updates to the software in 15 minutes, and spend a total of around 4 hours time. This included printing the pages, addressing envelopes, and stuffing envelopes!  I was particularly pleased with my confirmation mailing to the dealers, demonstrators, and speakers which consisted of over 500 tasks, with over 100 pages, and was done in less than 2 hours. Once again, this was for my 10 dealer show, that has 5 speakers and 4 demonstrators.  If I had 100 dealers at my show, I would guestimate that I would’ve then spent just 3 hours on that mailing!

5. All of the functions that you love with Excel, like spell checker, word replace, drawing, copy/ paste, delete, format settings, AutoFilter, Excel Help, functions, charts, and others are all accessible, because after all, you are using your current version of Excel that you have become accustomed to. Obviously you are then limited to what your version of Excel can do, and items like AutoFilter only show up after 2003.

6. To get a good idea of what I am referring to, you can view some screen shots to the left.

PRICING—

Our software is considered to be an exceptional value.  Software like the Show Planning Made Easy! software is based on a one year license, and for the show that I chair, it would cost my organization just $30.00 US dollars per year.  Since being a show chairman for the non-profit group does not pay well, and consumed loads of my time, there was a need to automate as much as I could and try to make it fun again.  You will always see a counter window when you first open up the software that will tell you how many days are left during your license period. Here is a LINK to more pricing.

Our approach is unique in the industry.  We use common Microsoft Software, such as Excel, which most people already own and feel very comfortable using and modifying, and  we allow them to get the most out of it.  By designing templates that you can then fill in your information and completely edit.  Why do we operate this way, you may ask?  The answer is simple: It is simple for us to make, and it is simple for you to use. Our concept is to make life easier by using easy programs.

Philosophy