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Dear all
I'm trying to track down the name/existence of software that I used in 1999 to 'write' a financial reporting system - it was a curious mix of spreadsheet with programming capability... Would any of you know about this? Its name was similar (-ish) to Visual Basic, but it wasn't VB itself... The way I was asked to use it was to collate financially reported information from a series of European entities and then present them in a specific format for the client. The client was Synstar (pan European disaster recovery computing service), since taken over by HP.

The reason I'm interested in tracking it down - is (curiosity, it's really bugging me that I can't remember its name!!... and also) to find out if there is something equally as logical, easy to pick up and user friendly that I could use. I would like to be able to take data from individual small/medium sized businesses and then have a lovely usable (customised) report pop out neatly the other end... I realise that there will be cloud based software that exists for this... but I'm enthusiastic enough to want to try for myself... (and I'm supposed to be studying/have teenage children/husband/housework and this would be a lovely excuse to do something that is not related to those... ).

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Several sensible guesses already appear in the replies: mentioned Crystal Reports and suggested PowerBuilder or Paradox. Those examples illustrate the common 1990s pattern: tools that sat between spreadsheets and full apps, combining tabular data, a template/report designer and a light scripting layer. Other contemporaries and xBase-style engines behaved the same way, so identifying the exact product comes down to looking for specific artifacts.

A practical forensic checklist for : inspect any surviving files or install media from that period and open templates/data files in a plain text editor to search for vendor or product strings; note file extensions and timestamps; check old emails, invoices or readme files for installer names; examine executable file properties or exported registry snippets for vendor keys; and look through archived screenshots or print samples for distinctive UI wording. When local evidence is exhausted, use the Internet Archive to search Synstar-era web pages or vintage software catalogs for likely partners (https://web.archive.org/).

For rebuilding the workflow today, a straightforward, low-friction pipeline works well: standardize client exports to CSV, perform transforms with a light ETL layer, and produce parameterized report templates that export to PDF/Excel. Practical modern stacks include Power Query / Power BI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/) for Windows-heavy shops, Google Sheets + Apps Script for simple cloud-first setups (https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets), or an easy open-source BI like Metabase for centralized reporting (https://www.metabase.com/). Old installers and executables are safest examined inside an isolated VM (for example, VirtualBox at ).

Note: sample filenames or short header strings from 1999 files typically contain vendor identifiers and will usually pin the product quickly. Running vintage Windows programs often requires legacy OS support and appropriate licensing, so handle executables inside an isolated virtual environment.

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Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

Any chance it could have been Power Builder or Paradox?

Edited by Reverend Jim
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