Method Community

Is there anyway to put a calculator into a cell in a grid? Similar to the calendar that pops up when you select the cell. 

Here's the scenario: 

In QB, when creating an invoice, the employee can go to the quantity section and enter their first number then the multiplication sign on their keyboard and the calculator comes up. They perform the rest of their calculations and hit enter. The resulting number is placed in the quantity cell and they complete the invoice. 

This is a huge time loss in moving this company from QB to Method. They deal with cut glass measurements regularly and are often times producing more than one line item on an invoice. The accuracy this feature provided in QB is important too. 

The calculation they are performing is Lenth in inches X width in inches divided by 144 to get sq feet. That's the quantity calculation for each piece of glass they are dealing with. 

Any way to put a calculator in a cell? I see where we can add the calendar feature...just didn't see a calculator. 

Basic math function won't do because these are custom cuts. Each piece of glass is a different size. 

Thanks much!!

Phillip 

 Hi Phillip,

I'm looking into the possibility of a calculator feature, I'll keep you posted.

Reading this post got me thinking, you could also add two fields for length and width to the InvoiceLine table and grid. Doing this and using the basic math action (on lose focus for both grid columns) can actually calculate (length * width / 144) and enter that value into the Quantity field automatically. By adding the fields it also gives you the option to include custom cut measurements on the invoice.

To take it a step further you can enter default length/width information for specific items so you can save even more time entering data.

Alternatively, if your heart was set on a popup you could actually create a basic little popup screen that is a calculator, using Method.

Hope that helps,

We're really in a situation where no two cuts are the same. So hard-coding the length and width won't work.

However, I was thinking through the pop up screen idea earlier and tend to prefer that.

Unless of course the Method folks decided to just put a calculator in there! :)

Thanks very much for the help on this and the ideas!!

I'll begin working on the pop up window for these guys. :)

Hey Phil -

Sounds like a fun project.  I think there is an opportunity here to actually be more efficient than QB, since you can create a custom calcuator for their unique business needs - just might require some creativity.  I know you are going to get to the point where the popup gets the value and you want to put it on the original screen when the popup closes.

What you want to do is set a SharedResult on the popup when it closes.  And then on the original screen, edit the screen, click Advanced, go to the OnPopUpClose event and use that to grab the SharedResult and put it into the grid.  For an example to reverse engineer, have a look at the Opportunites screen and what happens when you click the "..." on the customer, add a new customer and have it pop in when the popup closes.

Calculator - I can see us doing this one day.  Personally when I use QuickBooks I use the calculator all the time.  It's no small thing to do on a web page, though.  But, hey, we've taken on more challenging projects than that for Method.

I don't see us adding a calculator any time soon.  We've got lots of goodies on the go, some even coming out on next week's version - which I plan to write a geeky blog post about.  We also have some bigger projects too that are occupying a dev team's time.....so I honestly don't see a calculator finding its way up the priority list for at least the next few months. 

Paul

Thanks much for the guidance!

I understand the development process so I really appreciate the heads up on your possible time frame. 

I'm planning on working on this next week.