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- Average user rating: stars out of 20 votes Back to product review
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1 stars
Version: Sesame Database Manager 2.0.2
"Powerful program, but not for beginners"
Pros: I am a former user of Q&A 5.0, a MS-DOS relational database program developed by Symantec, but was never fully developed for Windows.. Q&A 5.0 was easy to use and to program. I absolutely loved the program. It was easy to set up, use, and customize. I have used it for years, but when I finally ran out of printers supported by printer drivers in the Q&A program, I had to consider Sesame. Sesame was developed with many of the same programming features of Q&A, plus many more features, and much more flexibility..
Cons: After purchasing Sesame I spent quite a few hours trying to successfully translate my Q&A databases, but was very disappointed with the performance of the translation process. I contacted technical support which was helpful, but afterwards I still found the program interface to be frustrating to work with. I was also not up for learning yet another programming language - required to enable some of the advanced features. When I was offered the option by technical supports to translate my databases for a fee, I was quoted an outrageous price of several thousand dollars to use their translation service for translating 4 databases, 3 of which were not that complex. As a small business owner I couldn't afford that, so I decided to try recreating the Q&A databases in Sesame from scratch. Again, I found the user interface very clunky and not intuitive. The menu commands, navigation, and program tools were not were I expected them to be. After having worked with a large number of Windows programs for years, the learning curve is fairly quick for learning new programs, but not not so with this program. I finally gave up on Sesame after about 2 to 3 days of work. Instead I am now considering another program called AnyOrder which will accomplish many of the database needs of my e-commerce and mail-order business. I would have considered MS Access, but did not want to use a Microsoft product. I truly would like to see Sesame succeed, but (with version 1), it has a long ways to go. What Sesame users really need are a lot of sample databases that can be easily modified by the user which would be helpful in shortening the learning curve.
I will have to agree with another reviewer, that you should draw your own conclusions about the similarity in tone of the 5-star reviews of this product submitted to date.
- 1 reply to this review
- Publisher's reply:
Thank you for your feedback. I'm not sure what you were trying to do, but if you want to try again, our Support people are happy to help. We will look into providing additional templates, although it has been our experience that our users don't want to do things the same way as others have. That's why they liked Q&A.
You do not need to learn a new programming language. Almost all the same commands you learned in Q&A still work the same way. There are, obviously, new commands that do things Q&A could not, but you are not required to use them.
I'm not sure why you feel that our positive reviews are in some way falsified simply because their opinion differs from yours. Your negative review is very similar to the other negative reviews as well. Perhaps people who like us sound similar, just as people who don't sound similar.
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