Has anyone experience the customer service side of Stardraw?  I have called the 888 phone number numerous times to hear the phone ring 13 - 20 times before a representive picks up.  At that point, he or she puts me on hold for an additional 30 minutes minimum without hold music (silence + line noise).  After time has pasted the representative that originally answered the phone, tell me that he or she will try again.  Back to the silence, and still no solution to my problem. 

Please supply some feedback to this problem.  This needs to be resolved quickly!

Hi Jared,

I have spoken with the customer service representative and they confirmed that they were unable to put you through to our technical support staff immediately for which we apologize. Apparently, you were reluctant to leave your name and number or email address and that you preferred to hold.

After much investigative work, we were able to find your phone number and return your call and resolve your technical support question.

In the future, if you have a technical question then please either post the question here or email techsupport@stardraw.com and someone will respond to you within hours and you will notice that the previous email you sent was answered within 1 hour.

Your question was regarding the External Datasource feature of Stardraw. For details of how to use this feature please visit http://www.stardraw.com/products/stardrawav/NewFeature.asp?date=0310

With this feature, you can set an unlimited set of attributes for each of your products in a simple Excel spreadsheet. When you then design your system using Stardraw, it will pull those attributes out of the spreadsheet and add them to the products in your design. You can then produce reports back out to Excel that contain those attributes.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Please feel free to post any further questions or comments to this forum.

Regards

Hi David, my name is Adam Kissick and I'm working with Jared on Stardraw. Like he said, we are trying to integrate it with our pricing libraries through a database. I have created the excel file through the "external datasourse" function and we are able to link up the symbols quite nicely. My main question is, how do you go about adding a new product to the library? My original idea was to add it manually into the excel spreadsheet and then link it through a specific symbol's attributes. I am in the early stages of attempting this, but so far my main problem is connecting to the excel spreadsheet. I could connect to an access database, but not through excel. If I am able to figure this out, will it be the best way to add in a new product to the existing product library??

In addition, I am trying to work off of an install on one of our network drives. This way, each of my co-workers could run off the same System Attributes file and Stardraw Offline library. Therefore, if one employee adds a product, the others will immediately be able to use it (with attributes) instead of each user entering in the data manually. My main concern is that the program will run slowly. Which leads me to my next question... Is there a way to direct the program (installed on a local drive) to access the System Attributes file and the Stardraw Offline library on a network drive? I think this would be the best of both worlds....

But like I said, I am in the early stages of working this through and I would like to get all the help possible... Thank you for your time and I shall look forward to your response and working more when I get back to work on Monday.

Hi Adam,

You can create a new product quickly using the Block Schematic Symbol Wizard and then dragging this symbol into your "My Libraries" folder. For more information on this visit: http://www.stardraw.com/products/stardrawav/NewFeature.asp?date=0212 and http://www.stardraw.com/products/stardrawav/NewFeature.asp?date=0111

When a symbol is dragged from the library list into your document, Stardraw will interrogate the Excel Spreadsheet looking for a sheet with the manufacturer name and a row that has column A with the Part Number. It will then add to that symbol all the attributes that it finds in that row. You just need to make sure you set the Model Number attribute of the symbol to the value in Column A of the spreadsheet.

Currently, Stardraw will examine the "c:\Program Files\Stardraw AV\Stardraw AV System Attributes.xls" or "c:\Program Files\Stardraw Audio\Stardraw Audio System Attributes.xls" depending on which Stardraw product you are using. You can simply copy this spreadsheet to each machine that is using Stardraw.

We are looking to add a feature to Stardraw where these files can be located anywhere on the network. The biggest issue is when the network or server is down or you wish to use Stardraw on a laptop that may not be permanently connected to your local area network. We believe it is very important for Stardraw to continue to operate in these environments and as such, a simple copy of the spreadsheet locally is much more robust as pricing doesn't generally change very frequently. If we allowed for either, then there could be a conflict where the pricing on the server differs from the pricing on local machine. Which one is right ?

Please let us know what you think should be done in these situations and we can consider it for a future feature of the month.

Thank you David for your quick response. I have succesfully created a new symbol, entered it's pricing into the excel spreadsheet and stardraw references the values perfectly. I guess my main concern was adding in new rows into the spreadsheet, but this seems to be of no concern since the program is just looking for part numbers in column A. My next question is regarding the automatic updates. Once the offline library is updated with new symbols from the website, will stardraw automatically add these products into the existing external datasource when you run that option under the tools menu? I just tried an update of this feature and the values I had entered in did not change, BUT there were no new products to update either. So I really can't be too sure...

As far as a networked or localized copy of the System Attributes file, I think the best of both worlds would be to have a single copy on the network that gets a scheduled update from each user at either a certain time of day (night) or during a program close. Then, if each install references the single networked file, everyone would always be up to date. Also, if each user had a scheduled download update of the online file either at program start up or early in the morning then the system would be up to date from the previous day's additions. An option to do a manual update would be good as well, in case a user needs to grab the information another has added. All in all, if the network should go down, there should be an option to switch to the local drive copy. Maybe even include an option for which system attributes file you want to use in the preferences menu. But even if there wasn't an automatic update feature, just the ability to point the program to reference a networked attributes file (in addition to a local copy) would be fantastic. It would just be up to the user group to maintain their updated work. I really don't think a disabled network would halt productivity to an extreme because the prices aren't changing that rapidly. Any needed changes or addition could always be handled manually for the time being. I think those are all my thoughts so far...

So let me know if any of that was helpful and also if what i said in the first paragraph made sense. Thank you once again for your time.

Adam,

In answer to your first question, yes, if you perform a Synchronize Manufacturers and run the External DataSource feature again, it will add new rows to your existing spreadsheet without modifying your existing rows.

As to your second comment, we have been talking this over internally since your post. We have agreed that we will add a user interface to Stardraw to allow you to specify remote locations for the retrieval of the external datasource spreadsheet as well as the offline database. When Stardraw starts, if it fails to find the remote files, perhaps because the network is down, then a message will be displayed asking if you wish to use the local files instead. This way, you can be sure that you are retrieving the files from the correct place when Stardraw starts. It will be up to you to ensure that the online files are replicated to the local machine for offline use. We will be adding this feature within the next month or so as part of the subscription service.

Thanks again for your input and suggestions.

Please feel free to post any other comments or ideas.

I am glad to hear this feature will be implemented. I think it will be a great addition to an already wonderful program. Also, thank you for your help regarding my external datasource question. It sounds like it is going to work exactly how I want it to (which was probably your intention when designing it. ). My only suggestion would be to make this information clearly available in the manual. The details of the automatic updates to both the system attributes file and the external datasoure are quite important and the explanation seems vague in the literature. If the manual states that the updates are selective in the information they add it would definitely eliminate questions like mine in the future. But hey, maybe I just missed something blatantly obvious when reading.  If I have any more questions or suggestions I will make sure to post them. Thank you again for your help and I am looking forward to the new update. Good luck!

I'm pleased to post that we have now added your requested feature for having remote directories for your offline database, Reports and even your symbols. Simply choose Library Directories from the Options menu from within Stardraw and you can set the locations of each of the directories, such as a share on your file server.

For more information on this feature, please click on:

http://www.stardraw.com/products/stardrawav/NewFeature.asp?date=0409

You can get the latest version of Stardraw by performing a LiveUpdate for your product on our website and it is available free of charge to everyone who has a current subscription.

Please let us have any feedback on this feature and please let us know of any other features you would like to see implemented.