posted by Matt McAdams on August 15, 2008 06:53 AM

We’ve been on a roll lately when it comes to adding useful new features to TrackVia. So I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that we’ll announce a new feature or product improvement every week. Call it New Feature Friday. Except...it might not always be on Friday, or every week...but we’ll try!

Today’s new feature announcement is that we’ve added three new field types to TrackVia:

• Currency. These fields are numbers, but they display with a $ symbol in front of them – or € or £ or ¥ if you prefer. They use commas as a thousand separator, and two digits are displayed after the decimal (this can be changed in any given context). They’re great for representing prices, commissions, revenue, or other monetary amounts.
• Percentage. Another numeric field, but displayed with a % sign. The number of digits displayed after the decimal is determined intelligently, but can also be set manually. In formulas, 30% acts like 0.3, for example when multiplying a percentage by a price.
• Auto-counter. These fields automatically increment each time you add a record. For example, you could have a field called Customer Number that starts at 1 (or 101, or any other starting number you like) and goes up automatically as you add records. Once a record is given an auto-counter value, that value cannot be changed or reused.

Like all TrackVia fields, these three new field types will be automatically detected when you import a spreadsheet to build a new database.  They also export to Excel with appropriate formatting. And of course you can convert them into any other field type, and vice versa. So an existing Customer Number field that you’ve been incrementing by hand (sorry about that) can be converted to an auto-counter, with existing values preserved and new values automatically assigned. If TrackVia detects any potential problems with converting a field to a new type, it will warn you, as always.

 If you’re a customer and would like help using these new field types, please call our Product Support group. Everyone else, tune in next week!