The Organized Wedding Consultant — Summary of Changes

Almost all of these improvements were initiated by you, our customers.  We not only appreciate your feedback, we use your feedback to improve The Organized Wedding Consultant, thereby improving your lives! Remember that your purchase price includes a year of free upgrades. We strongly encourage you to keep your copy of The Organized Wedding Consultant up to the most recent version. Keeping up-to-date not only gives you the best possible wedding software, it makes it possible for us to provide the best support to you.

What's New in Version 6.04

Fixed a bug that caused the software to crash on some computers.

What's New in Version 6.03

IMPORTANT: After upgrading, you might need to make the following three changes for your current clients.

1. If any of your current clients have someone other than the bride listed as the client, you'll need to update each of them as follows:
   • Go to the "Clients & Events" section and edit that client.
   • Click the "Client & Basic Plan" tab, then find the "Billing Information" section at the bottom of that tab.
   • Check the check box that says "The bill should be sent to …", and make sure that the information is correctly filled in for the client.
   • Click OK.
2. The first time you print from new views, the printout will be blank except for your page header and footer. 
   
   To fix it, please click the "Select Columns & Sizes" button inside the gold frame in the Print (or Print Preview) window.  You don't have to make any changes -- just click the OK button, then go on to print or print preview.   You'll need to click the "Select Columns & Sizes" button for each page layout you use (full size, day planner, etc.), but you only need to do it once to set it up.  After that, you can go straight to print or print preview with no problems. Some of the places this will happen are:
   • the 2 views in Clients & Events
   • the Gifts section, if you've checked the "Show date thank-you was sent" check box.
3. For folded place cards and table cards, we've changed the way vertical offsets work. The center point for the offset used to be at the fold, but now it is the center of the visible face once the card is folded. This means that for place cards, the vertical offset should probably be set to 0.00. If you're printing both names and table numbers on the front of a folded table card, you'll need to set the vertical offset for the name to a negative number (such as -0.4 inches) and the vertical offset for the table number to a positive number (such as 0.4 inches). These settings would print the name 0.4 inches above the center of the card face and the number 0.4 inches below the card face, allowing about 1/2 inch of space between the two lines of text.
   

   Old Offset		New Offset

Networking

Version 6.03 supports networked computers and multiple consultants working on the software at the same time. Click here for more information.

Throughout the Program

• In many views, you can click column headings to sort the information by that column. A little arrow indicates which column is currently sorted:

(In this case, it's sorting by the bride's last name.)

Most views now have standard "filtering" options so that you can easily control which information you want to see at the moment. To change which information the software is displaying, click a button like the one on the right. You'll see another window with options to specify which information you want displayed, such as showing only clients who are Prospects. The button changes to purple to remind you that you've filtered some information from this view.

• Added alphabet tabs to many views and dialog boxes to make it easier to move around in long lists.
• Added "What is this?" help to many spots to explain specific features.
• Added 26 new fonts (click here to see the new fonts — or download them for free)

Changes to "Clients & Events"

• This section now has two views — "By Client" and "By Event". The "By Client" view now has "Bride (or 1st Partner)" and "Groom (or 2nd Partner)" columns instead of a single "Client Name & Contact Info" column. The "By Event" view gives you a complete list of all upcoming events so that you can easily sort by event date, type, location, etc.
• We've simplified the process of entering the couple's information.
• Adding new clients -- now defaults to the bride & groom having separate addresses. If you don't know for sure that they're at the same address, leave the box unchecked. That will put them in separate households in Address Book, and if you find out later that they do have the same address, it's much easier to use the "People" view in the "Address Book" section to drag one name to the other's household than it is to separate them if you put them in the same household to start with.

  Note: If you do drag a person's name from one household to another, the software deletes that person's invitations, so you'll need to add them to invitations once they're in the correct household.

Printing

• Added options to print business envelopes in several sections, such as when you are editing client or vendor information.
• Added the option to print an envelope when you edit information about a gift in the "Gifts" section.
• Envelopes in Invitation List and Notice List
• The software now formats addresses and expands abbreviations for the following countries (click here to see some examples!):
  • - United States
    - United Kingdom
    - Canada (both French and English, with an option to change from one language to the other)
    - Australia
• Added the option to format addresses as staggered text (small, medium, and large stagger), in addition to left-aligned and centered.
• Envelope details: added graphics to explain alignments.
• Place Cards & Table Cards
  • You can now customize text for both.
  • If you customize text for a table card to "Do not print", it will not appear in the Decorative List. This is great if you want to combine the bride and groom onto one table card/line in the Decorative List with their new married name — customize one to "Do not print", and customize the other with both names.
  • Added "Print" columns so that you can select specific cards to print at one time.
  • Completely reorganized "Page Setup" and "Card Appearance" (buttons in each view). You can now specify left margins, there are graphics to explain offsets, etc. For table cards, re-organized "Card Appearance" to make it easier to print table numbers inside the cards.

Other Improvements

• Added a new help topic: Summary of Menu Options.
• Big Picture: now shows a maximum of 16 upcoming events. If you have more than 16, go to the "Clients & Events" section to see all your events at once.
• Added an option to the Art menu to "Dim the Big Picture" if the artwork is too bright for you.
• Backup & Restore: added "Browse" buttons to make it easier to select the folder you want.
• Guest Totals: The mathematics have been subtly corrected to make better predictions. Before, the histogram of probable attendance was computed on the assumption that all guests who had not yet responded would make independent decisions. Now, the model assumes that all guests on a single invitation who have not yet responded will make the same decision. While this has no effect on "Most likely attendance", it has the effect of narrowing the ranges for "realistic range" and "probable range".
• Budget & Vendors: revised and expanded the list of pie charts, and added the ability to print pie charts.
• All pie charts can now be printed. They appear on the page following the detailed statistics.
• Business Docs: added new keywords for vendor costs.
• In the "Custom Tasks" view (in the "Default Client Info" section), we've made it easier to create your own custom list based on our task categories.

Start by adding an imaginary client that has the most "typical" sort of wedding you plan — one with your most likely faith, invitation method (selected when you first create the database for a client), and events.  That ensures that the task categories will be closest to what you want for most of your weddings.

IMPORTANT:  make sure that the wedding date is more than a year off so that the task list due dates aren't compressed.

Once you have a client, make that client the current one (listed in yellow in the left-hand menu), then go to the Custom Tasks section and click the button to import a task category.  The program will ask you if you want to turn off the corresponding category in the "Original Tasks" section so that only your category will be brought in and not the one that came with the program. Then you can customize the tasks in the categories completely.

If you start each task list item with who's to perform it (Bride, Couple, MOB, Consultant, Me, etc.), you'll be able to filter the task list for a client to show just the relevant tasks.  Just make sure it's consistently spelled. 

From then on, when you add a new client, they'll get your custom tasks instead of our original tasks.

• There are literally hundreds of other changes throughout the entire program.

What's New in Version 5.21

Online Help

The Organized Wedding Consultant now includes help within the program. To see the help while running The Organized Wedding Consultant 5.21, just press the F1 key or select "Help" from the Help menu. From there, you can search for specific words or phrases, print the help topics, or just read them and go back to what you were doing.

If it were a printed manual, it would be 40 pages long! The help articles cover 14 major topics. For your convenience, we've also included the help files on our website (click the links below to see them).

1. The Four Most Important Things to Know
2. Working with Clients
3. Working with Vendors
4. Working with Budgets
5. Working with Task Lists
6. Working with Notes
7. Working with Appointments
8. Working with the Address Book
9. Working with Invitations & Notices
10. Working with Responses
11. Working with Stationery
12. Working with Seating
13. Working with Gifts
14. Working with Business Docs

What's New in Version 5.20

Business Documents

Business Documents constitute the biggest new feature in this version. From within The Organized Wedding Consultant (TOWC), you can define all kinds of "form letters" and other documents. When you create them for a particular client, TOWC automatically fills in the relevant information for the client — their names, the wedding date... over 130 distinct pieces of information! We've created 14 of these "form letters" (called document types) to get you started, including:

• letter to a prospective client
• client contracts and a change order for modifying a contract
• vendor contracts
• vendor confirmation, final reminder, and thank-you letters
• a client "grand summary" — a formatted printout of all the information you have about the client and the specifics of the events you're planning for them.

This feature is extremely powerful and flexible. We suggest that you start by working with a client for whom you've already entered a lot of information, and try creating a Business Doc for that client — perhaps a letter to a member of the wedding party. You'll probably notice that some information is missing, such as your company name and address, but we'll explain that below. Once you've created a document (with the "Business Docs" section), you might want to compare it to the Business Document Type used to create it, which is in the "Professional Setup" section at the bottom of the left-hand menu. When you edit or create a document type, be sure to click the "Tips & Help" button for some more explanations.

You can also add your own standard contracts, letters, etc. to the document types we've provided. You might be able to copy and paste your own boilerplate text into the document types we've provided, or you might want to start from scratch with a new document type. Either way, we suggest you keep our original document types around as examples.

"My Company" view in the "Professional Setup" section

Use this new view to enter the information about your own company into the program, so that TOWC can use the information in business documents. The information to enter includes company name, address, phone number, website, etc.

Note: When you "Print Preview" a document, the pages do not always appear in print preview exactly as they will be printed — the actual page breaks might be different.

"Workspace Persistence"

This impressive-sounding title just means that now, when you change settings within TOWC, the program remembers those settings so that you don't have to re-set them every time you start the program. For example, in the "Task List" section, if you've unchecked the "Days till Due" box because you don't want to see the column, it will remain unchecked even when you exit and re-start TOWC. It might seem trivial, but we think it will make the program more enjoyable to use every day.

Even more useful is that TOWC now remembers your current selection in the various sections, to help you remember what you were last working on. For example, if you were editing a household in the "Address Book" section and change to another section (or even change clients), the next time you return to the address book for that client, you'll see the same household highlighted.

Changes to the "Budget & Vendors" Section

• In the "Budget Overview" view, you can now adjust budgets by percentages as well as by costs.
• The "Budget Details" view has been simplified.

Other Improvements

• The various "Notes" sections have been improved. You can now format notes (change fonts, colors, etc.), and we've improved the process of using drag-and-drop to reorganize notes and folders.
• Color-coded filtering, so you don't forget you've filtered a view.
• Faster start-up time.
• Lower average memory requirements.
• Many other small changes throughout the entire program.