Piano Business Software

[Horace Greeley]

Larry,

The route to go might be to look at Dell's site and compare the cost of the
SBE Office '97 + Access with the cost of the full Office '97 Professional, 
which I believe they also offer.

I admit to a strong prejudice against SBE.  If you ever have to un-install
it, you will discover that it has placed "hooks" very, very deep in your
operating system.  In my office, we have had so much trouble with 
machines purchased with that setup that we simply reformat the hard drives
and do all new installs of all the software.  Be advised that, for me,
such a procedure involves one boot disk to a Novell server on which I 
keep complete installs of all of our required software, and the whole
process takes less than one hour.

There are a variety of _very_ good piano business-type packages offered
by some of our guild colleagues.  I think I'd suggest looking at them
before deciding.

One final thought, if I may, please, from day one, build your
business.  The time and resources you invest now will make the
difference in whether or not you make it later.  Once you have
x00 clients, you are not realistically have the time to go back
and start learning software.

Good luck, and best wishes.

Horace



At 12:59 AM 10/22/98 -0400, you wrote:
>List,
>I was thinking about purchasing microsoft Access '97 with the new PC I may be
>purchasing. The PC comes with Office '97 Small Business Edition and the
>company I am considering (Dell) is offering Access for $99 extra.  I don't
>know if that's a good price or not, but I was told that this is a very
>powerful and felxible data base. However, i just found a 60 day trial of
PTBiz
>piano business software that I downloaded and studied for a while tonight and
>it looks like an excellent program. Can Access do the same? (probably a dumb
>question).  I know nothing about Access '97 or how it compares to PTBiz
except
>that PTBiz is $300 which is pretty much out of my range at this early
stage in
>my business. I feel that the more organized I am even with less than 40
>customers the faster I can build my business. I am pretty near RPT level and
>at 46 I don't have too much time to build a business!!!!  Does anybody have
>any expierence with Access'97 or PTBiz that can shed some light on this
>subject for me? Any info would be much apreciated. Thanks.
>Larry Trischetta, Pocono NE Chapter
>Scranton, PA.
> 
Horace Greeley, CNA, MCP, RPT
Systems Analyst/Engineer
Controller's Office
Stanford University
email: hgreeley@leland.stanford.edu
voice mail: 650.725.9062
fax: 650.725.8014