Ah, yes, merge disks.  What a great way to allow multiple people to enter multiple tallies without a network (or even at home).  What could be better than that?  UTally.

What on earth is UTally?  It is the latest in "Merge Disk Technology".

One Time Setup

With merge disks, you have to install not only the merge disk program, but you also have to follow a list of instructions for the program to work on your computer.  There is some one-time setup required.

With UTally, you install the program one time with no setup required.  The program appears like any other program on your computer and you do not have to access Start | Run and type in a command to run it.

Files Save to the Hard Drive

It's happened to everyone.  A school was tallied on a floppy disk and brought back to the office - and the disk has become corrupted.  You call QDP and we try a couple of tricks to possibly recover the data, but it's too late.  The data is gone.

With UTally, the files are copied to the hard drive of the remote computer.  This has two advantages:

1. The program runs faster.  It does not have to continually access the floppy drive to gather information.
2. There is a backup of the files.  If for some reason the disk brought back to the office has become corrupt, the data entry person can simply insert a new disk and recopy the files.

There is a purge feature available in the UTally program that will delete old files off of the remote computer.

Email Files from the Program

As the internet and email grow with popularity, so has the ability to email the data files back to the office.  We know that many of you are already doing this, but it's kind of a hassle to remember which files need to be emailed each time. 

Now, you can email those files straight from the program.  There's no need to open an email program and insert attachments as the program will already do that for you.  There is a one-time setup for the email portion to work.