Please help- Reading/Copying Old Reports Without Report Assist [Solved]

[Loops]

Hi, Wondered if anyone could help me. I'm in a report panic. I have a new to me (but very old) laptop which doesn't have report assist on it (which we are no longer using at our school) however, it would be very useful to go back over previous years' reports. I still have them saved on memory stick and have opened them to find a turtle.zdb file. I extracted it to get a microsoft access file. However, although I can get into this using the password merlin27 I can't work out where to find the report text I had written for the pupils. Is it possible to get this back in some way? I don't need the whole report setup it would be just so helpful to re-read back over the text from those reports (and maybe paste them into word for future reference.....

Can anyone help me please??? Would be ever so ever so grateful.

Loops

[vikpaw]

Have you looked through all the tables and fields? Never used it before, but it could be encrypted somehow, though if you've managed to get access to the db, you probably just need to trawl through the different tables to find where it's stored.

[Loops]

Thanks, I've tried clicking on every table to see if I can find the text but it doesn't seem to be anywhere. I'm not familiar with access (or computers really! ) but I'll keep clicking on everything to see.....

[Loops]

Ah ha! I've found it!!!.... So, for anyone as daft as me who doesn't know how to do this I did the above (in OP) then clicked on the 'Report' Table, then the third field in called 'Report_text' it looks like it only holds 5 or so short lines of encrypted data. However if extended and then scrolled down it actually contains the whole amount written in the report by the teacher. Only it has random gobbledegook in between much of the words (where there was a new paragraph/space/subject etc) but at least its there! four years of reports re-found hooray!

[vikpaw]

Hooray.

[Loops]

Oh, and Vik suggested removing the weird gobbledegook by using find and replace which took me half an hour and hey presto some weirdly spaced but totally intact reports! yey!

[ComputingData]

The wierd gobbledegook (I think) is some kind of RTF style formatting. Maybe (not too sure) if you copy the data into a text file, then rename it with a .rtf, Word may import it? This way you may get any formatting back too.

 

Alternatively, you can load it into ReportComplete or ReportPlus (the demo of either program should work) by using the ReportAssist Wizard in advanced mode and pointing to the turtle.zdb or whatever.

Edited June 15, 2011 by ComputingData