This page and the subsequent ones linked at the bottom of the page list all of the significant improvements and bug fixes in each release of the program.

For anyone that is interested, we can send you a list of future work that we are considering doing. Please contact us by email if you want that.

Release 6.06d (December 27, 2023):

•In several variations of Reports ⇒ Receipt ⇒ All Receipts (which depend on whether you have chosen to have separate receipts for Gifts in Kind, and whether you are displaying the Eligible Amount field for donations), fixed the summary total amount fields to be lined up properly under the individual amounts in the report.

•For OnDemand and Local Network versions, display a banner saying "Connecting to SQL Sever" when it is attempting to do that as the program starts, or after certain other activities. Usually it will only be displayed for a fraction of a second, but if there is ever a problem with the SQL Server, the appearance of this banner will help you and our support team understand what is blocking the program from starting.

Release 6.06c (September 8, 2023):

•Fixed a bug in the Database ⇒ Reassign Envelope Numbers menu option, where selecting the option "All donors who already have an envelope #" causes a technical error message about invalid SQL, after which the reassign does not happen.

Release 6.06b (July 27, 2023):

•This change is only relevant for Software4Nonprofits staff: For OnDemand users, log many actions in the program that any user uses. This will enable us to determine which actions are most commonly used, by summarizing the results across all OnDemand users.

Release 6.06 (June 26, 2023):

•Removed an unnecessary restriction, that you couldn't use the Receipt ⇒ Duplicate/Corrected by Number menu option if the currently selected donor was non-receiptable. Since that option prompts for the receipt number to correct, it was not necessarily going to be used for the current donor! For Canadian users, this also applies to the Receipt ⇒ Gift in Kind Receipts ⇒ Duplicate/Corrected by Number menu option.

•When clicking Memorize from the SQL Select window, if your SQL is valid but doesn't return any rows of data, you are now given a choice of whether to still memorize it for later re-use. Previously you would get a message that it didn't return any data and you were not able to complete memorizing it.

•When using the Memorize button to re-save a previously-memorized report from either the SQL Select or Reports-viewing window, if you change the Name, you are now given an option of saving an additional memorized report with the new name, or renaming the previous-saved memorized report to the new name. Previously it always saved an additional memorized report with the new name (unless it was just a change in capitalization, which still doesn't cause you to be asked about this).
In addition, if you got to those windows from the Memorized Reports window, any changes made to the name of the memorized report you are working on are now reflected properly in the drop-down list of names on that window, which was not always the case before.

•Fixed an omission: the Help button in the Maintenance ⇒ Setup Abundant Online Donations window did nothing. Now it goes to the correct Help page.

•This change is only relevant for Software4Nonprofits staff: For OnDemand users, log each report that any user runs. This will enable us to determine which reports are most commonly used, across all OnDemand users.

Release 6.05b (May 16, 2023):

•Some internal code changes that do not affect the program's behaviour, related to our use of a new server URL for some of the services such as Internet Backups and license key requests.

Release 6.05 (April 23, 2023):

•Changed the Donor Category 1 and 2 fields, and the Donation Category field, to allow up to 40 characters. Previously they only allowed 20. To allow for this, various types of changes were made:

oWhere there was room, data entry and report fields were extended to hold the longer values.

oWhere there was not room in data entry windows, pop-up tooltips were added showing the entire value when your mouse moves over the field, and the drop-down lists of options were expanded to show the entire value.

oWhen there was not room in reports, the field was changed to wrap onto a 2nd line of the report, in order to show the entire value.

•When you are Configuring Bank Deposits, if you choose that it's for exporting to Software4Nonprofits ACCOUNTS, and you have ACCOUNTS on the same computer, then in the Edit Accounts for Categories window, the Account field drop-down now does not allow editing - you must select one of the Income accounts that was retrieved from your ACCOUNTS database. (If you need a new account in ACCOUNTS, you will need to create it there first, then you may need to restart DONATION to pick it up.)

•When you are importing donors or importing donors or donations from files, if you were importing the Member/Envelope # field and your input file had commas in those values (like 1,234) that would cause an error message. Now it's allowed - the commas are just removed.

•In the Find Donor window, if you enter a number that includes a comma in the Number field, you now get a clear error message instead of a techie one that just says "Expression is not valid". (Member/Envelope Numbers can only include digits, no commas.)

•Fixed a small bug in the autocomplete for fields like donor or donation Categories, and Cheque # / Paid By: sometimes if you had entered something, then entirely backspaced it to try entering something else, the autocomplete wouldn't start until you had typed 2 characters, when it should have started on your first character.

•Fixed a limitation of the Simple Filter window: you could not type (or paste) text into the Value field that was longed than would fit in the display area, because it would not scroll to the right as you typed.

Release 6.04c (March 23, 2023):

•Software4Nonprofits has a new website. Where possible, references in the program and this Help file to pages on the old website have been converted to the most closely corresponding pages on the new website. (Some less-used pages on the old website do not yet have equivalents on the new website, so links to them will be unchanged, and will still work.)

•Removed the little-used menu option Help ⇒ Read Manual. The main purpose of that was to take you to a web page from which you could download a PDF version of the entire help file. That really wasn't useful because it wasn't as searchable as the Help file, was way too long to print, and would go out of date as soon as there was a new release of the program.

Release 6.04b (March 18, 2023):

•Fixed a serious receipting bug introduced in Release 6.02, which could only occur for donors that had a value in the Donor Category 2 field, when at least one value available for the Donor Category 1 field was non-receiptable. It could cause two problems:

oIt could fail to create receipts for all of the donors it should have created them for, when using Receipt ⇒ All Donors or Receipt ⇒ Filtered Donors.and could give messages like "There are no receiptable regular donations" when trying to create a receipt for one donor that had receiptable donations, with Receipt ⇒ Current Donor Original or Receipt ⇒ Current Donor Sample.

oIt could give receipts to donors with a non-receiptable value in the Donor Category 2 field, with any of those same menu options.

oFor Canadian users, the same problems could apply to the special Gift in Kind receipts.

•There is a new option for Phone # Format on the Donor Details tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options. It allows you to switch between 10-digit phone numbers being automatically formatted like "(123) 456-7890", the default, to being automatically formatted like "123-456-7890", or to not be reformatted at all.

•The program already reminds you monthly to check for updates, if you haven't done so for at least a month. Now, if other users of the same database already have a newer release of the program than you do, it also informs you of that fact as part of the message encouraging you to upgrade. (However, that will only happen once all users have at least this release.) It can be important to have all users on the same release of the program!

•Fixed a bug: If you use Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options, and on the Pledges tab, you are using an option that allows for a default pledge category, and you change that category, and there were existing pledges with the old category, you are asked whether to update them when you click OK. If you answer Yes, then you got an error "Data Entry Error, Expecting 2 retrieval arguments but got 1". This was quite harmless except that if the current donor had a pledge with the old category, it would not be updated if you immediately clicked into.

•Fixed an obscure problem: If we ever gave you a SQL Updating password along with some SQL to fix or change some data in your database, and it was based on a version of your organization name but with the wrong capitalization, it wouldn't be accepted. You couldn't fix that by just changing the capitalization to match what we gave you, via Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info, unless you exited and restarted the program afterwards. Now in such cases that will immediately fix it.

Release 6.04 (March 1, 2023):

•Evaluation versions (with no payment) now allow you to create real charitable tax receipts, not just sample ones.

•The Standard version is now free for users with no more than 50 donors with donations in the current year, and thus does not require a payment or license key until you exceed that number. The only other limitation in that case is that you can only have one database for one organization.

•For the OnDemand or Local Network versions, or the Standard version if you have over 50 donors with donations, the program now starts with a 30-day evaluation period. If that expires before you pay and get the required license key, you get a 30-day grace period in which you can pay, before the program will stop working until you do pay. This replaces the prior wording of it being a 60-day evaluation period, though it gives you the same number of days.

Release 6.03c (February 22, 2023):

•Corrected the Lite Version Limitations help page, which incorrectly still stated that the Lite version had a large number of limitations. Most of those previous limitations were put back into the Lite version in Release 6.03, so it had almost all of the same features as the paid versions, but that page was not updated appropriately.

•Fixed a bug in Custom Reports, where if you selected any of the fields Month Received, Quarter Received, or Year Received from the Donation column, and also anything from the Receipt column, you would get a technical error including "Ambiguous field name between table DONATION and table RECEIPT DATE_RECEIVED".

Release 6.03b (February 18, 2023):

•Some files required by the features added back into the Lite version were omitted from the installer for Release 6.03. They have now been added back in.

Release 6.03 (February 17, 2023):

•The free Lite version, which used to have many feature limitations when compared to all other versions, has now had almost all of those features put back in. The only remaining limitations are that it doesn't allow for Switching Databases, and only allows a maximum of 100 donors with donations. It is also in the process of becoming a "legacy" version, meaning that existing users may keep it, but it will soon not be available to new users.

•Fixed a bug in the Maintenance ⇒ Recurring Donations window, where it would prompt with a technical-looking window for a YEAR_NUMBER.

•Fixed an oversight in the new menu option Tools ⇒ Pay your Annual Fee: it should not have attempted to do anything for the free Lite version, because that version is free! Now, using that menu option for the Lite version will give you an option to upgrade to the full Standard version, after which you could pay.

•When you request or automatically retrieve license keys, or request evaluation extensions, the program now sends us your Windows version number. That will help us to understand which older versions of Windows are still in use by our customers.

•A couple of users have had strange technical error messages when creating receipts for one donor, that include "validation error for column RECEIPT.TOTAL_AMOUNT, value null". While we do not yet know the reason for this, if it happens the program will now display a log of detailed information to be emailed to us, to help us resolve it.

Release 6.02 (February 10, 2023):

•Added a new menu option Tools ⇒ Pay your Annual Fee which takes you to our payment processor Stripe to pay for the program and set up an annual subscription.

•Fixed a bug saving built-in (not mail-merge) Gift in Kind receipts for Quebec to PDF, with an error like "Error at line ... in wf_save_pdf event of w_report: Name not found accessing external property year_number ...".

•Made some changes to prevent an occasional problem, particularly for OnDemand users, when doing Gmail-Specific Authorization. The fixed problem was one that would show you a technical log including a line saying "SocketError: WSAEADDRINUSE: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted."

•Two reports under Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ All Donations - Sort by Date, with Description and Sort by Date, All Fields - did not have the total Amount at the bottom of the report lined up problem properly under the Amount column. That is now fixed.

•Greatly sped up the loading of very large import files, for instance for use with the Database -> Import sub-menu options Donors, Donations, or Donors and Donations. This will probably not be noticed unless you have thousands of lines in your import file.

•Technical note, primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff: Major internal re-write of how the program ensures that everything is done for the current working year, as determined by the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year menu option. The previous method could sometimes cause random crashes when changing years, or doing related activities that might change the year, such as restoring a database backup.

•In the SQL that can be executed in the Database ⇒ SQL Select window, added a new value ":YEAR" that can be included, and will be automatically replaced by the current working year in the program, as set by the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year menu option. That helps to allow Custom Reports and custom SQL to be built that always refer to the current working year, or ones a specific number of years away from the current working year.

•Also in the Database ⇒ SQL Select window, if SQL is displayed from memorized reports that were memorized prior to this release, it is possible that some aspects of that SQL would no longer work properly. The program will inform you of that, and attempt to fix the SQL so that it will work.

•As well as silently sending us your Release Number after installing any update, the program also now sends us your Windows version number. That will help us to understand which older versions of Windows are still in use by our customers.

Release 6.01b (January 20, 2023):

•Fixed a problem introduced by Release 6.01, where when you changed years, a window would pop up with the heading "Specify Retrieval Arguments" and prompting for you to enter a YEAR_NUMBER.

Release 6.01 (January 19, 2023):

•Some users were having problems where the program would exit, with no error message, after returning from printing or emailing individual receipts, sometimes only after they did two receipts in a row. This release seems to largely prevent that.

•Fixed a bug for Canadian users of mail-merge receipts, when creating Duplicate or Corrected receipts. Any replaced or corrected receipt, which was for $0 and had no donations in it (because they were moved to be part of the replacement or correction receipt) would not display on the screen, or print. Only the replacement or correction receipts appeared and printed. Now the replaced or corrected ones do appear again, as they do for built-in receipts.

•Made two changes to the insertion of the DetailsTable field in mail-merge letters and receipts: you can now remove the Category field from the fields to display, and you can double-click on entries in the two lists (Available Fields, and Fields to Display) to move them from one list to another (the same actions as the Add or Delete buttons do).

•When you are setting up Gmail-Specific Authorization in the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window, when it takes you to a browser window to log in (if necessary) to your Google account and authorize emailing from DONATION, you now have 90 seconds to do so. It used to be 60 seconds, but that could be too short if you had any trouble logging in, or had 2-step verification required on your account.

•Prevented technical errors, which caused a crash in the program after allowing you to email us a screenshot, if you were editing the template for a mail-merge letter or receipt and you tried to Print it or Save PDF. The errors were "Error at line 44 in of_print event of u_web_browser" for Print, "Error at line 58 in of_pdf event of u_web_browser" for Save PDF.

Release 6.00d (January 9, 2023):

•Fixed a problem when Installing a license key with Tools ⇒ Request or Install License Key, where you would get a message saying "The second line of this License Key should be 34 characters long, but is actually 33 characters long" for a perfectly good license key. It happened for users who had paid by Stripe, had the Standard version, and had already upgraded to release 6.00 or later before they requested the license key.

•When using HTML in the body of emails to donors, one user was finding that the program crashed with specific HTML in the body. That is now fixed.

•One user was having problem with the initial creation of the Abundant online donations account. The technical transaction that was failing is now recorded in the program's log file in case it is needed.

•Technical note, primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff: Much of the code for regular expression handling in the program (which is used for purposes like validating that email addresses are correct) has been replaced by the use of a new library.

Release 6.00c (December 3, 2022):

•Prior to automatically transmitting a notice to us when you update your program, if your database doesn't yet have a Unique ID for Internet Backups, one will be assigned to it and transmitted to us. That does not mean that you have configured Internet Backups, or that you have to use them! Rather, that is a unique identifier for your database / account that will help with other automated processes, like future automatic license key retrievals (for versions other than Lite, which doesn't need license keys).

•A few users, when they updated to Release 6.00b, were getting a message about "Error in unlock key for Chilkat ..." when the program started after the install. While that could always be fixed with either a reboot or a 2nd install of that Release, we are not sure why it happened. This Release gives a more detailed error message if that problem occurs, which could be sent to us as a screenshot, to help us understand it and hopefully prevent it in the future.

Release 6.00b (November 25, 2022):

•Fixed a problem where email sending using the Microsoft SMTP server smtp.office365.com, configured with the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window, had stopped working recently.

•Fixed a problem: Importing PAR donation files had stopped working for at least one user, because the import file they were trying to import, that they had received from the PAR service, had incorrect line endings - two carriage returns and a line feed, which should have been just one of each. (We are not clear whether the file was sent out with this problem by the PAR service, or whether the file was somehow damaged when it was saved to the user's computer.)

Release 6.00 (November 23, 2022):

•The program now checks for whether there's a newer license key available for you to retrieve, every time you start it, even if your current license key isn't expiring yet - as long as your computer has Internet access.

•Made various changes to make the program work with our upcoming change of payment processors from PayPal to Stripe.

•Fixed a bug that allowed an automatic retrieval of an expired license key that expired before your program's release date. That didn't make sense, since the newer program is an upgrade, and an expired license key doesn't entitle you to an upgraded version.

Release 5.06e (October 31, 2022):

•Improved the change that was the last point in the notes for Release 5.06d, about silently informing us when you install a new release of the program. In most cases, that will now update our records automatically, rather than sending us an email.

Release 5.06d (October 17, 2022):

•Fixed some odd problems with Recurring Donations that can occur if there is a memorized recurring donation for a donor that has been deleted, or has not been copied from a previous year. The fixes include:

oAsking about deleting a donor's recurring donations if you ask to delete the donor,

oPreventing attempts to insert recurring donations in a new year that has not yet been switched to for the first time, and

oAsking what to do if there is a recurring donation that should be inserted for a donor that is not present in the data for the year of the recurrence date.

•Two further fixes related to Recurring Donations:

oWhen inserting recurrences with an End Date, after which there could be further recurrences before today's date if it was ignored, it was in fact ignored, and so extra recurrences were inserted.

oRecurring donations displayed on the Maintenance ⇒ Recurring Donations window now show up in all red font if they have an End Date prior to today's date.

•When you first install this release, or any new release after this, as long as you have Internet access working on your computer, the program will silently send us an email to inform us of your new release number. That will allow us to better support you if you have any problems with the program, since we will know what features and bug fixes you have in your release of the program.

Release 5.06c (September 28, 2022):

•When adding subtotals to a SQL Select or Custom Report, there is a new checkbox, after selecting the column that determines the subtotal breaks, for "Add page break for each new Subtotal value". If you check that, a page break is added between the rows for each value of that column (after showing the subtotal).

•Fixed an error when running the new Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Recorded Communications that gave a message including "[ODBC Firebird Driver] Sqlda variable has zero length", causing the report to not be displayed.

Release 5.06b (September 5, 2022):

•Fixed a bug introduced by Release 5.06 ("Error at line 51 in of_print event of u_web_browser") that occurred if you chose to Print a mail-merge letter (but not a receipt).

Release 5.06 (August 30, 2022):

•Added a significant new feature: Recorded Communications, that automatically records communications with your donors such as emailing, printing, or saving receipts or letters to PDF, allows you to manually record phone calls or visits to them, and allows you to view, edit and print reports on those communications.

Release 5.05d (August 18, 2022):

•Fixed a bug that could cause imports of donors and/or donations (with any of the first three options on the Database ⇒ Import sub-menu) to crash, after they finished successfully, with a message that started "Error at line 5 in f_record_sqlpreview event of nvo_import_donors_donations: Divide by 0 ...".

•Fixed a small problem in some of the One Date Donation reports options. If you used the Save PDF button, the resulting PDF version of the report would have blank pages (or ones with just little bits of lines at the far left) after each normal page of the report. That problem did not occur if you just printed to your printer, or used the Microsoft Print to PDF printer.

•Fixed the same problem with Save PDF having extra blank pages after each page in Custom Reports printed in Portrait mode.

•Fixed a few problems for Donor Only users, including not having access to the Report Browser or the Maintenance ⇒ Groups / Committees menu option. Also redesigned the programming that determined which menu options, and which reports, could be seen by Donor Only users.

•Made some small fixes to the Report Browser for all users, including that it did not show exactly the right report if Canadian users ran the All Receipts report under the RECEIPT REPORTS heading.

Release 5.05c (August 4, 2022):

•Fixed a bug introduced by Release 5.05: various actions, including trying to request or retrieve a license key, could give "Error at line 16 in gf_email_valid". Editing a donor's Email address value then tabbing or clicking out of that field could also give that error. Either error would crash the program.

Release 5.05b (August 2, 2022):

•Fixed bugs introduced by Release 5.05: emailing built-in (not mail-merge) receipts or statement reports would crash the program with an error such as "Error at line 517 in wf_email event of w_report". Printing built-in receipts could give a similar error.

Release 5.05 (August 1, 2022):

•The Database ⇒ Reassign Envelope Numbers window has a new radio button option in the "Give new numbers to" group: "All donors". That gives new numbers to every single donor, whether or not they are a business, and whether or not they already have an envelope number.

•Fixed a bug: in fields with the autocomplete feature, like the donation category, typed digits that were part of an entry on the list of values for that field would be ignored if they were typed using the numeric keypad. Digits typed using the top row of your keyboard were already working correctly.

•For users of the Abundant online donations system, added a new Help sub-section on Support, which gives information on how to contact ACS Technologies directly for problems that don't involved the DONATION program itself, but only the Abundant website.

•When the program creates receipts, which have security added so that they cannot be modified etc., changed it so that the Security property "Content Copying for Accessibility" was still enabled. That allows screen readers to read the text. (This needed to be fixed for built-in receipts, and for mail-merge receipts when you had not selected Chrome for saving PDF, in the Receipt Options window. If you used mail-merge receipts and used Chrome, it was already OK.)

•Fixed a bug that could occur when creating a new year's data with the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year menu option. If you were asked whether to skip copying donors with no donations in the previous year or previous 2 years, and you chose that option, and there were donors with Customer IDs but no donations in those years, it would throw an error and not copy any donors' Customer IDs forward to the new year.

•Corrected an oversight: users entering the program with the read-only password were allowed to edit Memorized Report names and descriptions on that window.

•This release was created with a new version of the programming environment we use - PowerBuilder 2021. Because of that, it can no longer be installed on Windows 7, Vista, or 8.0. It can be installed in Windows 8.1, 10, 11, or Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later.

•Made a change to the sequence of events when exiting the program that may prevent some error messages about not being connected to the database.

•Added a Help button to the Tools ⇒ View Saved Settings window.

Release 5.04c (June 22, 2022):

•When exporting Bank Deposits or Abundant Bank Deposits for importing into ACCOUNTS, export them in a way that is more guaranteed to work if they contain accented characters.

•(This point is primarily for our own staff.) Change some code used for reading text files that can fail to read the entire file if the file has an ANSI rather than Unicode encoding, but has accented characters in it.

Release 5.04b (June 21, 2022):

•For users using Gmail-Specific Authorization for their Email Sending Configuration, fixed problems that could occur in some situations:

oYou could get a message saying "There was an errors in the Specific Authorization for Google: Error: response information is not complete." After that you would have to redo the setup.

oYou could be required to redo the Authorization every time you used email sending with Gmail, if it was more than an hour after the last time you had used that.

•When you are setting up Recurring Donations, if you got a message about there being existing matching donations for dates prior to your entered start date, and you answered "Use these Settings" to accept your settings as entered anyways, the program would crash. That is now fixed.

Release 5.04 (May 31, 2022):

•Changed how the donation Category and the two donor Category fields work with the keyboard, in order to make it easier to select them when you have a lot of categories:

oPreviously you could not type in those fields, but pressing the first letter of a category would bring up the first category starting with that letter, and pressing it repeatedly would bring up successive categories starting with that letter.

oNow it has "autocomplete", where you can type in the field and it shows you matches to what you have typed so far, with the part you haven't typed highlighted so it will be replaced if you keep typing. So for instance if you had donation categories Garden and General, typing "G" would bring up Garden, and adding "e" would change it to General.

oYou can still use the drop-down list, or use the arrow keys to move through the categories (perhaps after typing the first part of a category name) even without dropping down the list.

•Fixed a problem when doing Gmail-Specific Authorization for your Email Sending Configuration. When it took you to the browser window to do the authorization on Google, if you didn't succeed in doing that, or closed that window etc., the program was supposed to stop waiting for you to do that after 60 seconds. It would actually never stop waiting, and you might have to force the program to exit, to get out of that wait.

•Fixed a problem for importing files downloaded from CanadaHelps: their CSV Data Download file would give errors and not import, unless you loaded it into Excel and re-saved it, either still as CSV or as a tab-separated text file.

oTechnical information about this fix, for Software4Nonprofits staff to understand it: The downloaded file was using the UTF16-LE Unicode file encoding with no Byte Order Mark (BOM), which really should not be done. (We have written to CanadaHelps to suggest they change this.) To adjust for this, we added some detection using a function supplied by Windows for detecting such files, which however can still give incorrect results for some files, and thus could possibly lead to other text files with unexpected encodings that were being read by DONATION being misinterpreted.

•Two fixes for the importing of Vanco donations:

oWhen displaying the donations to be imported, changed the display of the Amount to be in your normal currency format, rather than as a number with 4 decimal places.

oDon't allow donations that are not in your current working year to be imported into the current year. Instead, give a message saying what year they are in, with instructions to switch to that year in order to do the import.

•Fixed a subtle and somewhat unlikely to occur bug in the Simple Filter window. It occurs if you have two or more filter conditions using the Operators IN or NOT IN, and the comma-separated list of Values for one of the earlier conditions has more items in it than the comma-separated list of Values for one of the later conditions. In that case, one or more of the Values for the earlier conditions will actually be incorrectly added to the list for the later conditions, in the calculated technical filter string. (Note: no users have reported encountering this bug - we just happened to notice it ourselves!)

Release 5.03b (May 7, 2022):

•Since all @telus.net and @telusplanet.net email addresses are now served by Gmail servers, the verification etc. in the Email Sending Configuration windows has been changed to use Gmail settings for them. This also means that you can use the Gmail-Specific Authorization option for them. (This was supposedly fixed in release 5.01d, but actually wasn't.)

•For OnDemand users only, saving of PDFs from mail-merge letters or the mail-merge version of receipts had been having problems, for the last few weeks at least. Often it would work for one document, but hang indefinitely (showing the "Printing to PDF file ..." window) on a 2nd or subsequent one, particular when you were emailing with Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing or emailing a group of mail-merge receipts done together. This problem was caused by a change to the underlying remote control software, and fixed overnight on May 5th by our partners who run the OnDemand service at ACS Technologies. (The fix did not require this release of DONATION.)

•Changed the saving of PDFs with Chrome, for mail-merge letters and receipts, to have a reasonable timeout, so that if anything is going wrong with that process. it can't hang the program indefinitely, looking at the "Printing to PDF file ..." window.

•Two changes for users of the Cloud Storage Service:

oFor the cases when you do not have an Internet connection when you start the program, it gives better messages and options about reconnecting before you continue, to avoid having only read-only access to your data.

oFor the cases when you lose your Internet connection before you exit the program, it gives clear options to reconnect. If you cannot reconnect to the Internet, the messagebox about that now gives better instructions as to what to do to ensure that your last changes (if any) are uploaded to the Cloud Storage and your control of it is released.

•For users of the Cloud Storage Service or OnDemand version, the prompt that comes up if you have left the program running for two hours without doing anything in it, saying it will exit, is now forced to be "attached" to the program's main window, so the main window is always visible then it comes up. That should be clearer.

•Made some changes for automatic license key retrievals, so that if you have only paid for the Standard version, but have installed the more expensive Local Network or OnDemand version, you will get an appropriate message, explaining that an upgrade payment is required if you want to switch to that.

Release 5.03 (April 8, 2022):

•When you are entering new Donor Details or editing existing ones, made the following changes:

oAs you tab or click out of the Phone field, it will be reformatted into the format (123) 456-7890 if it was in various other formats, including if it is just digits, or with spaces, periods or dashes between the sections. Issues with 7-digit phone numbers are also fixed. (Previously this was only done, to a more limited extent, when you Saved the changes.)

oAs you tab or click out of the Postal Code field, both Canadian postal codes and US zip codes will be reformatted if necessary, for instance if there are no separators between the sections, dashes (which should be spaces) between the sections of Canadian ones, or spaces (which should be dashes) between sections of 9-digit US ones. Lower case letters in Canadian ones will also be upper-cased.

•Changed the help for Gmail Configuration to point out that after May 30, 2022, only the Gmail-Specific Authorization option, or using 2-step verification and an application password, will work. The option of allowing "Less Secure Apps" is being removed.

•Fixed a bug when setting up or editing Recurring Donations: If you set it up with a Start Date before today's date, the program checks whether there are already prior occurrences of this donation. If so, it proposes another starting date, after the latest date of those existing donations. If you accept the proposed date as the new starting date, that new date is now properly updated on the recurring donations detail window, which was not happening before.

•Added a Help page on OnDemand Troubleshooting.

•Added a new entry to the Troubleshooting section for the Cloud Storage Service (and a new Index entry under "Troubleshooting" to help you find that section!). The new entry is about what to do in the unusual cases when databases on different computers become out of synchronization with each other, so they have different data.

•Preliminary testing-only release of the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ PayPal Donations menu option. For now, all it does is allow you to enter your PayPal credentials for direct access, retrieve your December 2021 PayPal transactions, and optionally email them to Software4Nonprofits for analysis. The purpose of that is to help us design a feature for directly importing such PayPal donations into donors and donation in DONATION, by analyzing a number of users' downloaded transactions.

Release 5.02e (February 11, 2022):

•Fixed a bug in the main Email Sending Configuration window that happens if you switch back from Gmail-Specific Authorization to Normal Server Authorization, and then click OK to save that change and close the window. The next time you opened that Email Sending Configuration window, the window would show an empty area in the middle, rather than showing your saved email settings.

Release 5.02d (February 9, 2022):

•Fixed a possible problem with Gmail-Specific Authorization if you have an extremely long email address, where it could give messages about certain settings being too long.

•Prevented an error in Custom Reports, the SQL Select window, and in running Memorized Reports that were based on Custom Reports or SQL Selects, that could incorrectly give a message about "Error executing the SQL SELECT statement", with no further helpful details, if the SELECT statement you were executing returned more than 32,767 rows of data.

Release 5.02c (February 7, 2022):

•If you try to make a backup to a location on your computer's hard drive, you always get a message explaining that that is dangerous, in case your hard drive dies, and it would be better to backup to a USB memory key or elsewhere. You are then asked whether to do it anyways. The default response on that question has been changed from Yes to No, to better prevent you from doing that!

•Fixed a bug where after entering and saving your first donor, as a new user starting with an empty database, its details don't appear in the Donor Details area. Then if you immediately try to enter a donation and save it, you get a techie error message starting with "Error at line 15 in clicked event of cb_save_donation", and then the program exits after prompting to email it to us. Fortunately when you then restarted the program everything was fine.

Release 5.02b (February 7, 2022):

•Fixed a bug in the changes to Recurring Donations in Release 5.02: if you had more than one different recurring donation to be inserted, you would get a series of error messages starting with one with the title bar "Data Entry Error" and text "Expression is not valid", and the recurrences would not be inserted.

Release 5.02 (February 4, 2022):

•Improvements to Recurring Donations:

oTheir Start Date can now be in the past, so that they will cause recurrences to be entered prior to the current date.

oWhen there are multiple occurrences of a given donation that need to be inserted when you start the program (whether because the Start Date was in the past, or just because you haven't run the program for a while), they are now inserted all at once, instead of requiring you to confirm them one by one, and then continue on to the next batch of recurrences.

•Fixed a bug for users who also use ACCOUNTS on the same computer, whose ACCOUNTS database filename includes a single quote (apostrophe) character: several places in the DONATION that attempt to read data from the ACCOUNTS data would fail to do that. (They were trying to read either lists of income accounts, when you are setting up for Bank Deposits, or lists of bank accounts, when you are creating Bank Deposits.) Instead, they would pop up a small window asking for Firebird ODBC Connect credentials, which you would have to cancel. That would then be followed by an error message about being unable to connect to the ACCOUNTS database, and possibly another technical message later.

•Added a paragraph in the Help topic on OnDemand User Management, under the heading "OnDemand Login Passwords", about how you can't change your own password, and what to do if you need it to be changed.

•Fixed two bugs in Custom Reports for reports covering a range of years (specified with the From and To year controls):

oIf the range was only 2 years, and the later To year was not the current working year, and if there were donors in the earlier From year that were not in the To year, you would not be prompted to copy them up to ensure the report was complete. Now you are.

oIf you chose only Donation fields, or only Receipt fields, and no Donor fields, and also selected to report on a range of years that could cause it to prompt for copy donors from previous years forward to the To year if they were missing, it would give you that prompt. Such copying could not be needed if there were no donor fields in the report, so that prompt now no longer happens.

•Fixed two similar bugs in Importing Donors and Donations from One File:

oIf you specified that the Unique ID for matching to existing donors was the Member/Envelope #, and you were importing both that and the Email Address, and the Email Address was lower down in the list of Fields to Import than the Member/Envelope #, it would instead use the Email Address as the Unique ID. That would likely lead to unexpected results, especially when different donors share the same email address.

oIf you specified that the Unique ID for matching to existing donors was the Email Address, and you were importing both that and the Member/Envelope #, and the Member/Envelope # was lower down in the list of Fields to Import than the Email Address, it would instead use the Member/Envelope # as the Unique ID. That would likely lead to errors (if some donors didn't have Member/Envelope #s, or there were duplicates of the Member/Envelope #) or at least unexpected results.

•When converting data from The Church Assistant, Geminon, GiftWorks, Viansoft, Membership Plus, PowerChurch Plus, or Roll Call, avoided error messages that would prevent the conversion from completing if a donation category or donor category value contained a double quote character (").

•Made a change that could prevent a technical error message and crash (which we could not replicate ourselves) in the Email Sending Configuration main window, possibly when switching between "Use Normal Server Authentication" and "Use Gmail-Specific Authorization". (The error was "Error at line 16 in wf_validate_and_save event of w_smtp_options.")

Release 5.01d (January 20, 2022):

•Fixed a bug in Importing Abundant Donations that caused it to always give an error message about "Error retrieving web page" followed by another about "Could not retrieve Abundant donation reconciliation file ...".

•Since all @telus.net and @telusplanet.net email addresses are now served by Gmail servers, the verification etc. in the Email Sending Configuration windows has been changed to use Gmail settings for them. This also means that you can use the Gmail-Specific Authorization option for them. (Note: This actually was not correctly done in this release. It works in release 5.03b.)

Release 5.01c (January 18, 2022):

•Made a further fix to Importing Abundant Donations: previously, after successfully downloading and importing files, it would delete those import files from the server (though not from your computer). Now it doesn't delete them from the server, just in case they are needed again for some reason.

•Made some fixes to the Gmail-Specific Authorization option in Email Configuration:

oIt now catches some cases when there is missing information that would have generated very technical messages, give better messages instead, and can sometimes automatically reset the authorization to correct the problem.

oIf you switch back from Gmail-Specific Authorization to Normal Authentication, after a prompt to confirm you want to do this, your Gmail authorization settings are now cleared, so that if you switch back to Gmail-Specific Authorization again, you can start fresh.

•Corrected some messages that could come up in unusual situations, if the program had downloaded an installation file (for instance, with Check for Updates), and then was unable to run that installation. Previously some of those messages told you to find the file with the Tools ⇒ Explore Data Directory menu option, when in fact the file was in your Temp directory - the messages have been corrected to tell you to use Tools ⇒ Explore Temp Directory.

•Fixed a minor problem in Reports ⇒ Fiscal Year ⇒ Summary by Category: the amounts for each category were shown as plain numbers with 4 decimal places instead of in your standard currency format. (The grand total was shown properly with the currency format.)

•This is primarily a note for our own staff, to remember when this change was made, because it will not affect users of the program in any noticeable way: Made a change to how the program accesses secure services on the Software4Nonprofits.com website, that should prevent future "Error 106" problems like the ones that started happening for many users on September 30, 2021, and were fixed by changes in Releases 4.59d and 4.59e. (The affected services included Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and requesting license keys.)

Release 5.01b (January 13, 2022):

•Made a further fix to Importing Abundant Donations: if a donation reconciliation file that needed to be downloaded and imported was for some reason not present on the server where it needed to be downloaded from by the program, you were not getting appropriate error messages. Now you do get an informative message (telling you to report it to us) and the process stops immediately at that point.

•Fixed a problem where if you configured your email sending with the new Gmail-Specific Authorization option, and also in the Receipt Options window you checked "Bcc: to yourself", it did not send the Bcc to yourself when you sent emails to donors (such as for receipts) - it only sent the email to the donor.

Release 5.01 (January 11, 2022):

•Made a number of fixes to Importing Abundant Donations:

oIt now works properly around a year-end. Previously you were very likely to get stuck with incorrect messages preventing you from doing the importing, either to the final Abundant donations at one year's end, or to the first donations in the next year.

oIf users split their donations into multiple parts, with different Funds (donation Categories) and/or different Memos (donation Descriptions), only the first split line would be imported. Now they are all imported.

oThe window showing the donations to be imported now also shows the Description field.

•Changed the Find Donor window so that if you move it to somewhere else on your screen, the next time you open it, it appears at that same location.

•Fixed two bugs about changes to the Receipting Person name:

oIf you made the change in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, it might not affect all of the places it should affect until you exited the program and restarted it, or did certain other actions.

oIf you made the change either there or in the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window, and you were using the Standard version of DONATION, and you created a sample receipt (or created a real receipt but it didn't get saved, because you didn't print it, Save it to PDF, or email it), it would show the change. But if you then created another receipt, it would show the previous value of the Receipting Person name, from before your change! Exiting the program and restarting it also fixed this problem.

Release 5.00b (December 22, 2021):

•Fixed a number of issues, introduced by Release 5.00, that could prevent users from requesting license keys or evaluation extensions for the OnDemand version, or the upcoming subscription versions of the Standard or Local Network versions. The problems could also cause various incorrect messaging for OnDemand and subscription users whose support had expired.

Release 5.00 (December 7, 2021):

•This is the first release of the Standard and Local Network versions where, if you have made a payment on or after January 1, 2022, and gotten an updated license key after that, they will become subscription versions (that stops working after that payment expires, plus a 30-day grace period) . The OnDemand version has always been a subscription version.

•We have confirmed that DONATION works on Windows 11.

•Fixed a bug that could generate a technical error message including the text "Error at line 7 in gs_grid_ds_from_any_sql event of gs_grid_ds_from_any_sql: Cannot assign object of type transaction to variable of type nvo_transaction ...", when doing conversions from GiftWorks or Geminon data, preventing the conversions from working.

Release 4.60 (November 18, 2021):

•When you are doing your Email Sending Configuration for the first time, if you configure it in the first window from an email address from a known email provider or ISP, or from your email client program such as Outlook, then when you get to the 2nd window, there may be some new helpful messages. If it's a Gmail address, you will receive a recommendation to use the new option Use Gmail-Specific Authorization, and if it's any other email provider where we have some special information about extra configuration requirements, you will be given an option to go to the section of our web page www.software4nonprofits.com/smtplist.htm that shows the relevant details.

•Most messageboxes in the program now show a small camera button in the bottom right corner, similar to the camera picture that was added a while ago on most windows in the program. If you click that camera button on the messagebox, nothing happens immediately, but when you return from the messagebox by clicking OK or whatever other regular buttons are displayed on it, you will be prompted to email a screenshot of the messagebox to us. After you do that, the program will continue as normal.

•Fixed two bugs when you are Importing Donors and Donations, which may also be bugs if you are only Importing Donors or Importing Donations:

oIt would not import more than 32,767 donors from one file.

oIt would give error messages if you were matching for duplicates on the email address, and any of the email addresses to be imported contained dashes, like daniel-cooperstock@whatever.com.

•If you uninstall the program, it now no longer asks you whether to also delete your database file (DONATION4.DB), because that is dangerous if you uninstall when you should not be doing so. It also now gives you a message telling you the two directories that will still be left over after the uninstall, and that you can manually remove them and their subdirectories if you are positive you will never be using DONATION again.

•When you submit a registration from the program, or set up your Unique ID for Internet Backups and let it email that information to Software4Nonprofits, both of them now include your Release # of DONATION, so that we can know how up-to-date your software is.

Release 4.59h (October 30, 2021):

•This note is primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff to know when we made this technical change. Restored an index on the database table that holds bank deposits that was deleted as part of release 4.59g. This index detects and prevents incorrect duplications of data (that could only happen due to bugs).

Release 4.59g (October 30, 2021):

•Fixed a couple of subtle problems with Abundant Bank Deposits: Allow multiple bank deposits with the same Abundant batch # as long as they have different dates. When there are such multiple bank deposits, fix a bug where all of the donations on both dates could get associated with just one of those bank deposits.

•Removed an old database index that should not have been there, which could cause technical error messages (including the text "Attempt to store duplicate value ... in unique index IDX_BANK_DEPOSITS") when saving regular or Abundant Bank Deposits.

•This note is primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff to know when we made this technical change. On the rare cases when a database structure update that is part of an update to the program fails, you are given an option to go back and try again starting at an earlier structure update. That did not always work - it would sometimes get stuck on trying the same updates rather than going back to an earlier one. Now that is fixed.

Release 4.59f (October 28, 2021):

•Prevent a minor issue for users of the Cloud Storage Service introduced some time ago: even if you did nothing in the program, or only looked at data without making any changes, it would always upload a backup of your database back to that Service on exit. It was only supposed to do that if you made changes. That was not harmful, but was unnecessary.

•Fixed a bug when adding subtotal breaks to the SQL Select window (often based on a Custom Report) where it many cases it could generate incorrect SQL that would not run.

•Fixed a bug that gave an incorrect Internal Error message, and prevents the ability to save Abundant Bank Deposits when there are undeposited transactions in Abundant batches with more than one date received within the same batch.

Release 4.59e (October 1, 2021):

•Better solution than the temporary one in release 4.59d, to prevent "Error 106" errors that many users were getting when doing Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and perhaps a few other parts of the program.

Release 4.59d (September 30, 2021):

•Put in a temporarily work-around to prevent "Error 106" errors that many users were getting when doing Internet Backups, connecting with the Cloud Storage Service, doing Check for Updates, and perhaps a few other parts of the program.

Release 4.59c (September 20, 2021):

•When exporting regular Bank Deposits for importing into ACCOUNTS or QuickBooks, in the unusual case where a split amount in the transaction is negative, prevented it appearing in the file with two minus signs preceding it, which might not import successfully.

•When exporting Abundant Bank Deposits for importing into ACCOUNTS or QuickBooks, corrected the signs of the split lines - the transactions had been unbalanced, and would not import, since a bug introduced in release 4.54b! Also fixed the internal unique IDs assigned to each transaction to prevent inappropriate messages about duplicate imports when importing a file containing several days' deposits.

Release 4.59b (September 16, 2021):

•Fixed a bug with the new screenshots feature, that meant that for some users with versions of Windows prior to Windows 10, and certain and scaling factors (like 125%), the screenshots were of the wrong area of the screen and thus not helpful!

•Fixed a bug for Limited Users: if you did any data entry on the main window (such as entering a donation), after you Saved that, the Maintenance menu would remain disabled. It should have been disabled during the data entry, but re-enabled when you finished. This bug did not happen if you used the Batch Entry window.

•Fixed a small bug in messageboxes from the program, for users whose computers are set to use certain languages other than English (for instance, Simplified Chinese) where a question mark would appear on what should have just been blank line.

•For the menu option Database ⇒ Import ⇒ From PowerChurch Plus, if the program cannot find where your PowerChurch Plus data files are automatically, it now prompts you to select the drive and directory where they are located. Also corrected a problem that could lead to it being unable to connect to the data files.

Release 4.59 (September 7, 2021):

•Users of the versions that allow for simultaneous users (Local Network and OnDemand) can now change the program's working year when other users are also running the program. In that situation your year change will only be temporary, during that run of DONATION, and will not affect other users. (Previously the year could only be changed when only one user was running the program, and the change would then affect any other subsequent users.)

•Fixed a bug in the integration with Abundant, that could cause the same transaction to be imported twice when you use the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Abundant Donations menu option.

•Added the menu option Tools ⇒ Turn Debug Mode On, which gives you an option to temporarily turn what is called "Debug mode" on in the program, if we have asked you to do so. Doing that causes certain debug messages and logging to occur, to help us solve problems you are having.

Release 4.58b (August 24, 2021):

•For OnDemand users, prevented a possible but very unlikely error, where actions that are not allowed while more than one user is logged in, such as restoring a database backup, would still be allowed.

•For OnDemand users, fixed a bug preventing the following feature introduced in Release # 4.57 from working. (It instead gave an error message.)

oWhen you are configuring accounting program accounts corresponding to donation categories, for bank deposits, and you also have our ACCOUNTS program installed, then if possible the Account field will now turn into a drop-down list of the Income accounts from your ACCOUNTS database. Also, in the actual Bank Deposit entry windows (for cash and cheques etc., or for Abundant donations), if you also have our ACCOUNTS program installed, if possible the Deposit to Bank Account field will have a drop-down list of your Bank accounts in ACCOUNTS, and if the Advantage Account field is displayed, it will have a drop-down list of your Income accounts in ACCOUNTS.

Release 4.58 (August 20, 2021):

•Added new alternatives in the main configuration window of Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration: radio buttons to choose between Use Normal Server Authentication (which is what the program has always done up to now), and Use Gmail-Specific Authorization, which is a special option for Gmail accounts, and accounts using email addresses on your organization's domain using Google Workspace (formerly called G Suite). Details on the new Gmail option are in the Gmail Configuration help page.

•Added a more detailed section about transaction fees to the overview Help topic for Abundant.

•Put in more helpful details about how to do split receipting for users in the U.S.A.

•Since the Remote Database Version was discontinued on August 1, 2021, removed most of the references to it and Help about it in this Help file.

•The program can now convert from Membership Plus version 4. Previously it could only convert from versions 5 and higher.

•Fixed a bug, when you are importing donors, or importing donors and donations. The bug only happens if you specify that the Email address is the unique donor identifier, and you are updating or ignoring existing records based on that, and you are also importing the Member/Envelope # field. In that case, if a row in the import file matches an existing donor on both that Email address and the Member/Envelope #, you got an incorrect error message about adding a duplicate Member/Envelope # - which should have been allowed, since it was just an update to the same value.

Release 4.57 (July 28, 2021):

•You can now add subtotal breaks and subtotals to reports created with Custom Reports or directly with the SQL Select window, in addition to the grand totals that they already included.

•When you are configuring accounting program accounts corresponding to donation categories, for bank deposits, and you also have our ACCOUNTS program installed, then if possible the Account field will now turn into a drop-down list of the Income accounts from your ACCOUNTS database. Also, in the actual Bank Deposit entry windows (for cash and cheques etc., or for Abundant donations), if you also have our ACCOUNTS program installed, if possible the Deposit to Bank Account field will have a drop-down list of your Bank accounts in ACCOUNTS, and if the Advantage Account field is displayed, it will have a drop-down list of your Income accounts in ACCOUNTS.

•When prompting to save a PDF file, the program will now never offer an Append option if an existing filename is selected, when what you are saving to PDF is a mail-merge letter. This change is designed to prevent errors if you accidentally append one donor's letter to another donor's letter, then send that to one of those donors. (Appending was already not allowed for all receipts.) So now appending to existing PDFs is only allowed for reports.

•Added a new Help topic on Salutations for Donors, which gives suggestions for how to set up the salutation in mail-merge letters, if you want it to use the first name, but you are recording couples with different last names in the same donor record.

•Changed the "Year Received" donation field in Custom Reports to give the same values, but no longer automatically generate a sum of the Year values in each row of the report at the bottom of the report!

•We also failed to mention in the notes below for the change from the Custom Reports fields "Month # Received" and "Quarter # Received" to "Month Received" and "Quarter Received", in release 4.56, that that also prevents them from automatically getting totals at the bottom of reports.

•Also in Custom Reports, you are now not allowed to include more than one full name field, such as any of the fields Name, Name with Title, etc., and Reversed Name etc., both because it doesn't make much sense, and because it could cause some problems if you wanted to add subtotals to the report. You can still include as many individual name fields as you want - Business Name, Title, First Name, Middle Initial, and Last Name.

•If you have set up automatically recurring memorized donations, and you have not used the program for a fair while, there is a potential issue - you could have to accept a bunch of recurrences before you can get into the program. Now, if you are in that situation, after each set of recurrences is inserted, you are given an option to continue with further recurrences, or stop for now, and have them inserted the next time you start the program.

•Fixed a bug for users of Abundant, in the Maintenance ⇒ Donation Categories window. If you deleted a category that was marked as being for Abundant, it wasn't removed from the online list of Abundant funds, unless you afterwards made other changes in that window and clicked Save to save them. (Any Save in that window always updates the entire current list on Abundant to match the list with Abundant checked in the window.)

•Prevented a crash, with the message "Error at line 155 of wf_retrieve event of w_report" if you do a One Date Donation report, then use the Save SQL button, followed by possibly editing the saved SQL, then use the Load SQL button. (Having said that, One Date Donation reports are ones where there is very unlikely to be anything helpful you could do with those features!)

Release 4.56b (July 5, 2021):

•(This was actually added in release 4.56.) When you click a Save PDF button or equivalent menu option for a report, receipt, or mail-merge letter, and you choose to save it to a file that already exists, you now get an option to Append the new PDF to the existing file, as well as the previous options to replace the previous file, or cancel the save.

•In release 4.56b, do not offer that Append option for Save PDF if it is a receipt, to avoid any risk that you will append a PDF of one donor's receipt to an existing PDF of a different donor's receipt, and then send them both to one of those donors!

Release 4.56 (July 5, 2021):

•Added Automated Reports Running Scripts, run through Reports ⇒ Run Reports Script, which allow you to write fairly simple scripts in a text file, to do automated jobs including running one or more reports, filtering them, sorting them, saving them to various file formats, and emailing those saved files to anyone.

•In the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, allow the selection of Letter versus Legal paper size (or A4 for users in countries other than Canada or the USA).

•Made 3 changes to the Donation fields list in the Custom Reports window:

oChanged "Month # Received", which just gave the month of the date received as a number (1 to 12), to "Month Received", that gives it as values "01 - January" through "12 - December".

oChanged "Quarter # Received", which just gave the quarter number of the date received (1 to 4), to "Quarter Received", that gives it as values "Q1" through "Q4".

oAdded "Year Received", which just gives the year number of the date received. This could be used in multi-year reports, although using the controls in the Multiple Year Totals area of the Custom Reports window is an alternative way to do that.

•Fixed a bug in the Report Browser: DONATION REPORTS ⇒ Current Donor ⇒ All Years Details was incorrectly printing the same report as DONATION REPORTS ⇒ Current Donor ⇒ Current Year Details.

•For OnDemand version users, fixed a weakness that you weren't being notified, and shown this Revision History page, when the program had been upgraded since you last used it. (Unlike all other versions, we do the upgrades to your OnDemand version programs when they are available, so you don't have to.)

•Fixed a bug that happened if you were emailing mail-merge letters or receipts, and the Name of a donor included a double quote mark ("). It would give an error message about the name not being found in the merged document, and fail to email.

Release 4.55b (June 11, 2021):

•Made some important fixes in the importing option for users switching from the PowerChurch Plus program into DONATION, that was introduced in the previous release.

•Various routines for conversion from other programs, or importing data, used to show any errors or issues you would need to fix in the Notepad text editor program. Now they are shown in a window within DONATION, which makes things a little simpler.

•Fixed a few menu options in the mail-merge editor, such as Insert ⇒ Table, which if they were the only changes you made, would allow you to close the editor without being prompted to save your changes.

•Added some details about the requirements for PCI compliance if you use the Abundant online donation system.

Release 4.55 (June 7, 2021):

•Added an importing option for users switching from the PowerChurch Plus program into DONATION.

•Users of the OnDemand version can now be given an access level of "No Access" to a database, in the Administer All Users window. This would be helpful for OnDemand clients with multiple databases, where some users should only have access to some of the databases.

•Users of the Remote Database version will now receive a message, each time they start the program, telling them how many days are remaining until that version is discontinued (on August 1, 2021), before which they have to switch to the Standard or OnDemand version.

•Fixed a weakness for users switching from later versions of Membership Plus into DONATION. It needed to download and install an extra component (an ODBC driver) for this conversion to be done, but when the program tried to run that downloaded installer, it would fail, and you would have to run it manually. Now it should run automatically.

•Fixed a crash in the mail-merge editor, if you used the Insert ⇒ Table menu option. It would crash with an error about "Error at line 7 in open event of w_base".

Release 4.54e (May 26, 2021):

•Changed the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations menu option and the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option to handle French dollar amounts, which could have the dollar sign at the end, spaces for thousands separators, commas instead of periods for the decimal point, and semicolons instead of commas separating fields, when Excel files are saved to CSV for importing.

•Added links to see the US$ and C$ transaction processing fees into the Abundant Overview help page.

•Undid a change in release 4.52e that could create error messages such as "Internal error: trying to add the key ... a second time to an nvo_keyvalue object." While the change that caused those messages is not known to have affected the behaviour of any functionality in the program, it could possibly have done so.

Release 4.54d (May 18, 2021):

•Changed things so that license key requests for Organization Names with non-Roman characters, such as Chinese or Hebrew, should work properly.

•This note is primarily for Software4Nonprofits staff to know when we made this change - it should not affect users! When the Remote Database version is downloading its database to become a local database, permissions are no longer granted by the program to the database usernames that the Standard and other versions use, but the Remote Database version does not use. That is because the process of doing the backup on the server, that gets downloaded to the local PC, grants those permissions instead.

•Added a section to the Abundant Overview help topic about setup for users with multiple databases.

Release 4.54c (May 10, 2021):

•Corrrected the name of ByTheBook's Roll Call, that DONATION can convert from - we had been spelling it "RollCall", without the space.

•Fixed a crash in the Lite version, if you tried to use any feature that is not included in it, which should have brought up a window explaining about that. The bug was introduced in release 4.53.

Release 4.54b (May 7, 2021):

•Fixed a change in release 4.53, which caused Bank Deposit transactions exported to QuickBooks (QB) to fail to be imported. It turns out that the transaction type field in the exported .IIF file for QB has to be "DEPOSIT", even though such deposits get shown with the type "DEP" after importing. In addition, the "NAME" field in those .IIF files, which we understood would go into the PAYEE field in QB, was being ignored. We have added a "MEMO" field, with the same value (such as "Deposit from DONATION") that will get imported so that you can see what it is. (It is not clear that there is a way to get QB to import a PAYEE when it is importing deposit transactions.)

Release 4.54 (May 6, 2021):

•Added an importing option for users switching from the Roll Call program into DONATION.

•Corrected an error in the initial setup of the Abundant online donation system.

•Fixed a bug where changes made in the Maintenance ⇒ Organization Info window didn't show up in various places (including receipts) until you exited the program then restarted it.

Release 4.53b (May 3, 2021):

•Changed a place where the new feature that can add automatically take a screenshot of unexpected messageboxes, and then prompt to email them to us after you click a button on them, was being set incorrectly. The effect of that was that the next regular (not unexpected) messagebox included the text saying it was going to take the screenshot and offer to email it to us, when it should not have done so. Also changed the text added to the messagebox in the unexpected cases, explaining that a screenshot will be taken, to be entirely bold, to make it more obvious.

Release 4.53 (April 30, 2021):

•The Abundant online donation system is now tightly integrated into DONATION. The integrated features include launching the setup of Abundant from DONATION, importing automatically downloaded daily donation batches, and creating the bank deposit accounting transactions for those batches.

•Most windows in the program now have a small camera icon in some corner of the window. Clicking on it automatically saves a screenshot of that window to a file, then brings up a window that allows you to email the screenshot to us, with your comments. Some technical messageboxes also have a similar mechanism for emailing them to us. See Screenshots for Tech Support for full details.

•When Bank Deposits are exported to files for importing into ACCOUNTS or QuickBooks, the transaction type had always been "DEPOSIT", which is different from the standard transaction type that both of those programs use for deposits, which is "DEP". It has now been changed to "DEP" in those exported files.

•The Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window now allows you to use Port 587 or 465 with the Security option None (after warning you that it is unusual), if it is allowed by your email provider.

•Fixed a bug in the One Date Batch Entry Options window, where if you don't have "Include existing donations for the specified date" checked, the Batch Description gets filled in as "All" instead of the time, and then that isn't accepted when you click OK.

•Some users have been having problems with updated versions of the helper file HtmlMessageBox.dll not being installed when they do upgrades, likely due to interference from their anti-virus software. (We can assure you there is nothing wrong with that file!) The program now checks on startup that that file is present, and is as up-to-date as it should be.

Release 4.52e (April 9, 2021):

•Fixed a problem causing selecting and editing of logo and signature images to fail, with an error such as "It appears that a 3d-party Image Viewer control installed with DONATION, that is needed for this feature, needs to be reinstalled". Reinstalling did not fix the problem, but updating the program to the current release does fix it.

Release 4.52d (March 24, 2021):

•Changed a lot of places in the program that accessed web pages or utilities (such as for requesting license keys) on our website, that were using insecure web pages (http://...), to instead access the same pages securely, with https://... addresses.

•Fixed a technical problem where some stored procedures in any new databases created recently were not absolutely correct. This problem would have been very unlikely to affect any users, but for technical reasons it was important to fix it.

Release 4.52c (March 4, 2021):

•Fixed a bug in the Maintenance ⇒ Recurring Donations window: If there was a row there with the name "MISSING DONOR!", which means it was for a donor that has been deleted from the current year, or not copied forward from a previous year, and you clicked Edit, you got an error message and the program crashed. Now you get a message explaining the situation, and recommending that you delete that row.

Release 4.52c (March 4, 2021):

•Prevented a harmless error when switching to a different database, with the Database ⇒ Switch Databases menu option for the first time after upgrading to release 4.52 or higher, that said "Internal error inserting row into CONSTANT_TEMP table ...". This error could also come up after restoring a database backup made by an earlier release.

•Made a correction to the validation of the Username field in the main Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window that was previously allowing various sorts of invalid email addresses and parts of email addresses. (What's supposed to be in that field is either an email address, or the part of an email address prior to the "@" sign.)

•Fixed an error in the window for associating accounting accounts with donation categories (part of configuring bank deposits) that could give an error message that starts with text like "The donation category NAME is set to be allowed for online donations via Abundant, but you have not specified an accounting Account for it." That will be part of an upcoming feature, which offers a tightly integrated online donation system called Abundant for use with DONATION, but was not supposed to be active code yet.

Release 4.52b (Feb 26, 2021):

•Fixed a bug introduced by Release 4.52, where you could not create a new year for the first time in the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year window, even when you were using a single-user version of the program (Lite or Standard) or were the only simultaneous user in a multi-user version.

•When you are editing your SMTP settings in the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration window, there are now additional validations done and warning messages that can appear if the settings you have entered do not match our best knowledge of the correct settings for your email address' domain (the part after the "@" sign) or your entered SMTP Server value.

Release 4.52 (Feb 25, 2021):

•Recurring donations can now be bi-weekly (every 2 weeks) in addition to weekly and monthly.

•Further improvements for users of the OnDemand version who have been trying to open files from, or save files to, the C: drive, which is the OnDemand server's drive. Your local computer's C: drive shows up as J: under OnDemand, with subsequent drives like USBs showing up as K: or L:. All File Open or File Save type dialog boxes now give you warning messages if you navigate to a folder on the C: drive, telling you to use J: etc. instead, and prevent you from clicking Open or Save if you are in a folder on the C: drive.

•Message boxes that have a Help button on them now work in a more convenient way: the Help file is opened immediately, and you can switch between it and the program. Previously, you had to close the Help file that was opened, before you could resume working in the program.

•Fixed the fact that the Help button in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option was not going to the right Help page.

•Fixed a bug in the versions that allow for simultaneous users (Local Network, OnDemand and Remote Database) where if you created receipts but didn't print them, save them to PDF, or email them, they were still saved back to the database, despite a message saying that they were not being saved! This bug was apparently introduced in Release 4.39, in September 2020.

Release 4.51d (Feb 17, 2021):

•Put in a better fix (than the one in release 4.51c) to a problem introduced by release # 4.51b, where a small number of users doing updates got error messages about not being able to create a Global Temporary Table. If that problem is encountered, the program now prompts you through automatically backing up and restoring your database, which fixes the problem.

•For the Standard, Lite, Local Network Server, and OnDemand versions of DONATION, if your database file does not exist when the program starts, it will now be created by copying from an empty database installed with the program. (This is particularly for new users of OnDemand, to ensure that they get an up-to-date empty database to start with.)

•Users of the OnDemand version who try to save files such as backups, PDFs, data exports etc. to the C: drive, which is the OnDemand server's local drive, not their own computer's local drive, are now given a message about that not being allowed, and asked to try again. (Under OnDemand, your local computer's C: drive shows up as J:, and additional local drives, like USB memory keys, show up as subsequent letters like K: etc.) There's also a message warning you about that before you try to do any database restores.

•If you start the program and your licensing file donsl.txt is not present in the program's Data Directory, it is now automatically created, with data in it that starts a 60-day evaluation period starting on the current date. This is particularly for the OnDemand version, to make sure that new users start with an appropriate evaluation period, because their setups never have that licensing file pre-installed.

Release 4.51c (Feb 12, 2021):

•Fixed a problem introduced by release # 4.51b, where a small number of users doing updates got error messages about not being able to create a Global Temporary Table. If that problem is encountered, you now instead get a detailed message telling you what to do to fix it, which is basically making a database backup then immediately restoring that backup.

Release 4.51b (Feb 12, 2021):

•Fixed a problem in the mail-merge editor, where when you used the Insert ⇒ Page Break menu options, the visible page break text and line that appears on your screen also appeared when you printed or saved to PDF, at least for some users who did that recently. If you have that problem in an existing mail-merge template, please write to us for a fix.

Release 4.51 (Feb 10, 2021):

•In the Reports ⇒ Custom Reports window, renamed "Batch" in the Donation fields list to "Batch Description" to be clearer what it means. That field is only shown if you have checked "Use Batch Descriptions" in the Donations tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window.

•When you are using the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors menu option or the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option, if you have donors with two email addresses in the Email field, separated by semi-colons, and you choose the option to use the Email address as the unique donor identifier, a single email address being imported can now match either of the two existing addresses.

•Made some changes in the OnDemand User Management Help page to reflect some changes to the User Management application.

•The Tools ⇒ Check for Updates window now has a Print button when an update is available and thus revision history is being displayed, to print that revision history.

•Fixed a bug where if the donation Description column was being shown with a drop-down arrow for the appraiser, and you used the Correct button, the Description field in the window that came up had a black background so you couldn't see anything you typed into it.

•Fixed a bug in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ From GiftWorks menu option: if you chose a GiftWorks backup file (one ending in ".gbf"), it would give an error during the extraction and renaming process and could not continue. (The error involved duplicating the path that it was stored in.)

•Fixed a bug where using the «DetailsTableAllCategories:...» merge field on a pledge letter (with pledge type Annual with Start Date and Category) for a donor with a pledge but no donations in the current year makes the entire resulting merge be blank in Letters ⇒ One Letter. It can also cause error messages when such donors are encountered in Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing.

•Put in some code to hopefully prevent an occasional error when exiting the mail-merge editor, with wording like "... cannot convert any in Any variable to boolean. Possible cause: uninitialized value".

Release 4.50h (Jan 27, 2021):

•Some improvements to the OnDemand help topics.

•In the OnDemand Administer All Users window, user names are now forced to upper case, to match the User Management application. (Logins can still be done wit the user name in any case, though passwords have to be in the right case.)

Release 4.50g (Jan 22, 2021):

•Fixed a bug in One Date Batch Entry: if you are showing Batch Descriptions, have already done one batch for a given date, and have "Include existing donations for the specified date" unchecked, and then you do another batch for that date, with a different Batch Description, it was instead incorrectly adding the donations you enter to the first batch for that date. Now it correctly puts it in a new batch with the description you entered.

Release 4.50f (Jan 13, 2021):

•Fixed a bug introduced by release 4.50e, where when you were creating a bank deposit, and clicked the Export button, you would get an error "Error at line 112 in clicked event of cb_export...".

Release 4.50e (Jan 13, 2021):

•Changed the program to default to using Chrome, when it is present, for generating PDFs from mail-merge documents (including in order to email them). It uses that instead of the novaPDF printer driver. (OnDemand versions already always used Chrome.) In case you experience any problems with this change, it can be turned off, except for the OnDemand version, with a new checkbox in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window.

•Fixed a bug: when you are using the Donors Only password (or are a Donors Only user of the Remote Database or OnDemand versions) the layout of the main window was not correct, with a large blank area at the bottom of the window.

•For OnDemand, when it has to convert Excel files to CSV (for various importing features), some users were encountering error messages. This release uses a different external program to do that conversion.

Release 4.50d (December 26, 2020):

•Fixed a problem causing editing of signature images to fail, with an error that starts "It appears that a 3d-party Image Viewer control installed with DONATION, that is needed for this feature, needs to be reinstalled". Reinstalling did not fix the problem, but updating the program to the current release does fix it.

•For users of the cloud-based OnDemand Version, added a warning when they are backing up, if they choose to back up to the J: drive, which is their local C: drive. This is similar to the warnings given to other users if they back up to their C: drive, that if it dies, they could lose all of their data.

•Technical point mostly for our internal memory: If you chose "Run DONATION" from the last screen of the installation program, it used to run it with elevated Administrator privileges, the same way the installer itself ran. That was different from how DONATION was normally run, and could cause some unusual errors during that first run done directly from the installer. Now if you do that, DONATION is run with your normal user privileges.

•Put in a fix in the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates window, that may prevent an error message about "Error ... in destructor event of ole_web" when the program is being closed in order to run the downloaded installation program.

Release 4.50c (December 17, 2020):

•Added a couple of further places explaining about our licensing and payment rules for multiple user with multiple databases, like the existing information about that here.

•Added a check when the program starts up that it has all of the expected database permissions. There was a potential problem about that with our initial version of the instructions on the website for switching from the Remote Database version to the OnDemand version. (Those instructions have been changed to avoid the problem.)

Release 4.50b (December 15, 2020):

•Added instructions for automatic logins with the OnDemand client program to the Command Line Arguments page.

•Various additions and improvements to the OnDemand help pages.

Release 4.50 (December 14, 2020):

•This release introduces the entirely cloud-based OnDemand Version, which runs on a server, through a small remote-control client program, and does not require installation of the DONATION program itself. Like the Remote Database Version, multiple users can access the same database at the same time, each with their own login, but it is much faster than the Remote Database Version.

•When you get errors configuring emails in Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration, the technical log file that is generated is now shown to you in a special window with a button on it that allows you to email it to us for our suggestions.

•In the Database ⇒ Merge Duplicate Donors menu option, fixed an oversight that would have caused Customer IDs belonging to the donor being merged into the other donor to be deleted, rather than being moved to the other donor as they should have been.

•Made a fix that should prevent an error that came up to a few users occasionally, that said "Error at line 22 in wf_display_donations_header event of w_donation: Error accessing external property business_name ...". (Restarting your computer seemed to always make that error go away.)

•When you are associating accounting account names to your donation categories as part of configuring bank deposits, it does not work in either ACCOUNTS or QuickBooks if you precede the name by its account number. The program now warns you if it appears you are doing that.

•In the Lite Version, the option to use a Donors Only Password had been accidentally allowed, which was not our intention. That option has been removed.

Release 4.40b (November 17, 2020):

•Fixed a bug where on new installations, the mail-merge letter and receipt templates would not be loaded properly into the program's database, and thus could not be used.

Release 4.40 (November 14, 2020):

•The Easy Tithe online donation system now has a special Software4Nonprofits export format for importing into DONATION. See Importing Donors and Donations from Easy Tithe for full details on doing that export from Easy Tithe and import into DONATION.

•Backups can now always back up to mapped network drives, and also to UNC paths (\\computername etc.), except for the Local Network Client version. Restores can now always restore from mapped network drives, and also from UNC paths.

•All users of the Remote Database Version can now use the Maintenance ⇒ User Administration ⇒ Administer All Users menu option. However, only users who are Administrators can make changes in the window that comes up - everyone else can just see the information about the users.

•Fixed a bug that can cause an error message "Common Dialog Error: Error Number 65535" to come up when you use certain parts of the program that bring up a window for selecting a file to open, or specifying a file to save, if certain other parts of the program that also do that have been used first.

•Removed the Backup/Restore ⇒ Restore Old Database (DONATION3.DB) menu option, because it was only needed for conversion from version 2.70b or earlier of DONATION (released in 2007 or earlier), and almost no users should still need that. If you need that, contact us and we can do the conversion for you.

Release 4.39c (October 13, 2020):

•Fixed a small bug introduced by Release 4.38: If you pressed F2 (or used File ⇒ Edit New Donation) before you had actually entered or edited any donations, it did nothing.

•Fixed an inappropriate error message when installing the Local Network Client version, where it would say "Could not copy file ... DONATION4.EMPTY ... Source file(s) does not exist...". (There was more text where the "..."s were.) Clicking Cancel on that messagebox would allow the install to complete successfully.

•Fixed an error in installs of the Local Network Server version, on computers on which it had never been installed before, that could prevent the Local Network Client installs from succeeding. That error could be fixed by copying the file DONATION4.EMPTY on the Local Network Server computer, from the directory in which the program files had been installed, to the Data subdirectory of the program's Data Directory.

Release 4.39b (October 11, 2020):

•Made a change that would prevent an error that started in release 4.39: If you used Tools ⇒ Check for Updates, and then when it prompted you to make a database backup before the update you answered Yes, it could give an error like "Error at line 12 in uf_decode_mapped_drive_file ...". If you are getting this error, and you want to make a backup before updating, please do it separately, then answer No when Check for Updates asks you about making a backup.

•The same error may have been able to come up if you did Database ⇒ Validate, or answered Yes if the program prompted you to validate your database as you were exiting the program, and also if you were restoring a database backup.

Release 4.39 (October 8, 2020):

•There are now special features for importing donations from the Vanco online donation service, including:

oA new option to allow working with Customer IDs (3rd-party identifiers for donors) in the Show Fields checkboxes of the Donor Details tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options.

oOnce that option is selected, the following other features become visible:

oAn IDs button in the row of buttons in the Donor Details area of the main window, for maintaining the Customer IDs for the currently displayed donor.

oA new report, Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Customer IDs, displaying all such IDs that have been stored in the program.

oA new Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Vanco Donations menu option for importing export files in a special "Software4Nonprofits" export format that you can ask Vanco to send you daily or weekly.

•Fixed a bug introduced in release 4.13: built-in receipts that should have been encrypted to allow them to be viewed and printed, but prevent them from being modified etc., were not encrypted. Mail-merge receipts were encrypted properly.

•A few releases ago, all Database ⇒ Import menu options that used to save Excel files that you specified as tab-separated text files before importing them, were changed to save them as CSV (comma-separated value) files before importing them. (We failed to record that in that release's points below.)

•Fixed an error that could be caused by that change to saving Excel files as CSV. It was trying to save as Unicode CSV files (ones that would handle many types of non-English characters), and much older versions of Excel could not do that. Now if a save from Excel to a Unicode CSV file fails, the program silently saves it as plain-text CSV instead.

Release 4.38b (September 23, 2020):

•Fixed a bug: In new databases created with new installs since the Middle Initial field was added as an option to the program, or additional databases created with Database ⇒ Switch Databases menu option, mail-merge letters could give error messages about missing the MIDDLE_INITIAL field.

Release 4.38 (September 22, 2020):

•Added a new Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option that imports files with both donor and donation information on the same line. Completely revised our previous help topic on this (pointed to by the "menu option" link in the previous sentence) that required using both the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors menu option, and the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations menu option in turn to achieve that same effect.

•Revised the Help topics on importing from PayPal and from CanadaHelps.org to use the new Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option.

•In the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors menu option, and the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations menu option, if you are importing CSV files, there would be a problem if quoted fields in the input file were broken up over multiple lines of the file. (We saw this occurring in the MESSAGE TO CHARITY field in files exported from CanadaHelps.) That is now fixed - multi-line fields in CSV files are now treated as if they were on one long line. This change also applies to the new Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors and Donations menu option.

•In the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations window, the extra window for associating new donation category values with existing donation categories, or creating new categories for them, no longer comes up if the import is merely using previously saved conversions of such values. It only comes up if there are new categories that have not previously been converted to existing ones.

•There is a new Maintenance ⇒ Imported Category Conversions menu option that allows you to make edits to previously saved and remembered conversions of imported donation categories.

•Fixed a bug that can happen when you have the Sort Order on the Donations tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options set to "Oldest to Newest". If you make a change on the new empty donation row on the main window (which appears at the bottom of the list with that option), but don't fill in the Amount, and you also make a change on the previous row, then click Save, you get a techie error like "validation error for column DONATION.TOTAL_AMOUNT, value **null**", and you cannot save your changes.

•Fixed two small bugs in validating the entry of a new donor with a name that was the same as an existing donor's name, which should cause the program to ask you if it's OK to add them despite the duplicate name. First, it wouldn't check that if the current donor selected on the Donor List was the one with the same name. Second, if the other donor with the same name had nothing in Address Line 1, instead of getting a proper confirmation message, you would get a messagebox just saying "NULL" and asking you to answer Yes or No!

•Made a change in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ PAR Donations window, that could prevent occasional crashes in the program after the import was finished. (Any such crashes would have been harmless - the import still completed successfully.)

•Fixed a bug: if you have selected an option, on the Donations tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options, to allow display of previous-year donations on the main window. The bug was that you could click the Correct button on a displayed receipted donation from a working year other than the current one, in which case you would get a techie error message and the program would crash. Now if you click Correct, you get an appropriate message if the donation is not in the current working year, telling you to switch to the required year if you need to correct it.

Release 4.37d (September 11, 2020):

•Fixed a crash in the program introduced by Release 4.36, with text like "Cannot create storage structure to hold mail merge data ...". It occurs in the Letters ⇒ One Letter menu option or Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing menu option, when choosing the type Pledge Information and clicking Merge, but only if your Pledge Type on the Pledges tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options is anything other than "Simple Annual Pledge".

Release 4.37c (August 12, 2020):

•The drop-down list for the Cheque # / Paid By field for donations now includes a row for "<Add New>". If you select that, you are immediately put into the Maintenance ⇒ Donation Paid By Values window, with its New button already clicked, to add a new value to the drop-down list. If you do add one or more values while you are in that window, the last one added will be immediately inserted into the Cheque # / Paid By field when you return from that window. (This feature was added because many users were asking us if we could please add things to that list, who had not discovered the menu option that allowed them to do it themselves.) See Entering New Donations for more details.
Warning: If you do not have a Default Paid By value, so that the Cheque # / Paid By field comes up blank for new donations, do not just use the down arrow key to navigate through the list of options without actually dropping down the list by clicking the drop-down arrow. If you do that, because the first item on the list is always "<Add New>", that will immediately select that item, and then pop up the window for adding another Paid By value! Just using the arrow keys to navigate through the list of options is not efficient in any case: dropping down the list and using your mouse to make selections, or typing the first letters of your desired selection until it comes up, are both far easier.

•There was already a similar "<Add New>" option for the donation Category field, but it was not enabled on the window for correcting receipted donations. Now you can also use it there (as well as on the main window, and on the Batch Entry window).

•Added a Help topic on making Screenshots for tech support emails.

Release 4.37b (August 7, 2020):

•Fixed a small bug caused by our fix to the last bullet point below for Release 4.37. The bug could cause two users sharing a database, both of whom had Release 4.37, to not see any changes each other made to the email Subject lines or Body when emailing receipts.

Release 4.37 (August 6, 2020):

•When you are emailing receipts or letters, you can now optionally add an additional attachment (in addition to the PDF receipt or letter) to those emails. That is done with a new Optional Attachment option on the window for specifying the email.

•The Letters ⇒ Email Everyone and Letters ⇒ Email Newsletters menu options have been merged into one Letters ⇒ Email Donors menu option, that handles either requirement: emailing donors with or without an attachment.

•Added a new Help topic HTML in Emails to Donors which has some simple instructions for doing that in the Body of the emails you send when emailing receipts or mail-merge letters, or using Letters ⇒ Email Donors.

•Fixed two small bugs: When you drill down into a summary field in a report (such as in Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Donation Info ⇒ Sort by Name) to see the details making up that summary amount, then you use the details report's Back button to come back, the paging controls (the icon buttons for First Page, Previous Page, Next Page, and Last Page) were not necessarily re-enabled or disabled properly based on whether or not the main report you returned to had multiple pages. Now they are. Similarly, if you create or change a Filter in a way that changes the report from one page to many, or vice-versa, those paging controls are now appropriately enabled or disabled. (The controls are disabled when there's only one page.)

•Made it clearer when those report paging controls are enabled by adding a solid black border around them in that case. When they are disabled (when the report is only one page) their border is grey.

•Fixed a bug in the Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing window: If you checked the checkbox for "I want to just export the data to a file", and picked any of the types in Section 1 of the window other than Individual Donation Information or Total Donations Information, you would get an error message such as "Error at line 320 in wf_retrieve_data event of w_merge_group. Name not found accessing property receiptable ...", and the program would crash.

•Fixed an obscure bug: if you have "Email receipts, letters and statements only to yourself, for testing" set in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, generate a receipt, then only Email it (to yourself, for testing), it is not supposed to be saved back to the database. However, if during that emailing you changed the Subject or Body of the email to be sent, the receipt did get saved back to the database.

Release 4.36b (July 31, 2020):

•Fixed a crash in the program introduced by Release 4.36, with text like "Cannot create storage structure to hold mail merge data ...". It occurs in the Letters ⇒ One Letter menu option or Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing menu option, when choosing the type Total Donations Information or Pledge Information and clicking Merge.

Release 4.36 (July 30, 2020):

•Added a new Groups and Committees feature, that allows you to set up a list of the groups or committees within your organization (with Maintenance ⇒ Groups / Committees) and then specify which donors are members of each one (in the new Donor Details field Groups / Committees). You can hide that new field, if you are not interested in it, with a checkbox on the Donor Details tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window.

•Added a Help topic on Importing Donors and Donations from QuickBooks.

•Fixed a weird (and unlikely) problem with pledges. If you had chosen a pledge type other than Simple Annual Pledge, given a donor a more complex pledge, then decided to switch back to the Simple Annual Pledge type, that donor's pledge would end up uneditable.

Release 4.35 (June 26, 2020):

•Made major internal coding and feature changes to both the Letters ⇒ One Letter menu option and the Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing menu option:

oChanged the order of the sections in the Mass Mailing window.

oFor Donor Information Only, Current Donation Information or Individual Donation Information, and Total Donations Information type merges, added a Receiptable merge field, that indicates whether the donor and/or the donation is receiptable. (See Mail Merge Fields for full details on what that field means for each type.)

oFor Total Donations Information merges, added a Receiptable field to the fields available to be displayed in the DetailsTable.

oAdded a checkbox for filtering the donations to be included with the donor, which is only enabled for Total Donations Information merges. If you do that and you restrict the donations to be included, that will affect the TotalAmount, EligibleAmount and AdvantageAmount totals fields, as well as the contents of the DetailsTable and SummaryTable. Uses of this might be to restrict the donations to only one donation category, or to only receiptable, or only non-receiptable, donations.

•In the Mail Merge Editor, when you are editing original templates (rather than completed merged documents), the fields in the "Insert Field" drop-down list are now just the names of the fields themselves, rather than being surrounded with "«" and "»" (the way they get inserted into the template). This makes them easier to read, and also means that if you are in that list and press the first letter of a field name repeatedly, it will cycle through the fields that start with that letter.

•In the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors menu option, imported Phone values like 1234567 will now be reformatted and saved as 123-4567, and values like 1234567890 will be saved as (123) 456-7890. Also, matching on email addresses is now case-insensitive (upper or lower case don't matter).

•In the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations menu option, if negative values are found in the Total Amount field, you are now given a choice of just ignoring input file lines like that, instead of that being an error that causes the import fail. Also, matching on email addresses is now case-insensitive (upper or lower case don't matter).

•Broke up the new Help page on Importing Donors and Donations from One File into three. The main page contains the general information. A new page contains the information about Importing Donors and Donations from CanadaHelps that was previously in the main page. And there's a page of new information on Importing Donors and Donations from PayPal.

•Changed the Database ⇒ Change Date of Donations menu option to allow the From date to be in a different working year from the current one.

Release 4.34b (May 29, 2020):

•Added some tests to the Tools ⇒ Network Client Information menu option (which is only in the Local Network Server Version). The tests check for some of the things that would prevent the Local Network Client Version installation from working. If any of them are detected, you will be given a message and told to contact us.

Release 4.34 (May 28, 2020):

•Significantly redesigned the Check for Updates window, including now displaying the changes since your last update on the window itself. The program also now always prompts you to check for updates once a month, to encourage you to get the latest features and bug fixes. (Previously you could opt out of those once a month checks, with an option on that window.)

•Several improvements to the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors window:

oAdded "Skip Column(s)" to the list of Donor Fields on the left (though it isn't really a donor field!). Picking it prompts for a number of columns in the input file to skip, adds "Skip N Columns" (with "N" replaced by your entered number) to the Fields to Import list on the right, and leaves it there on the left.

oAdded an option of using an Email Address field as a unique identifier for matching input file rows to existing donors, in addition to the existing option of using the Member/Envelope Number for that purpose.

oAdded an option to ignore lines in the input file matching an existing donor. (The matching is based on your selected Unique ID field.)

oAdded an option to ignore lines in the input file matching a previous line in the input file. (The matching is based on your selected Unique ID field.)

oAdded the ability to drag and drop rows in the Fields to Import list up and down, to re-order the list, in addition to the existing Move Up and Move Down buttons for that purpose.

oFixed a bug: The feature that prompted to allow you to continue if there were more columns in the input file than specified in your Fields to Import only worked if you specified that there were 0 header rows. If there were 1 or more header rows specified, you would just receive an error message about this and not be able to proceed.

oEntirely blank lines in the input file are now ignored, rather than causing an error that would stop the import.

•Several improvements to the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations window:

oAllowed the columns to be imported in whatever order you want, by using an interface like in Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors, with a list of Donation Fields at the left, and a list of Fields to Import at the right. You can move columns between the lists, and move columns up and down in the Fields to Import list.

oAllowed there to be no Cheque # / Paid By field in the import file.

oAdded the Advantage Description field as an importable field.

oAdded "Skip Column(s)" to the list of Donation Fields on the left (though it isn't really a donation field!). Picking it prompts for a number of columns in the input file to skip, adds "Skip N Columns" (with "N" replaced by your entered number) to the Fields to Import list on the right, and leaves it there on the left.

oAdded an option of using an Email Address field as a unique identifier for matching input file rows to the donors for whom the donation is to be recorded, in addition to the existing option of using the Member/Envelope Number for that purpose. Exactly one of those two fields must be included in the Fields to Import.

oYou are now prompted to allow continuing with the import if there are more columns in the input file than specified in your Fields to Import list.

oEntirely blank lines in the input file are now ignored, rather than causing an error that would stop the import.

oAdded an option Import "Pre-Receipted" into the Cheque # / Paid By Field, for cases when what you are importing is donations that have already received tax receipts from another charity. (This would apply to imports from CanadaHelps.org, for instance, which is a charity and issues its own receipts.)

oIf there are new Category field values found, you will be prompted with an option to associate them with existing categories (in case they are just different names for the same category). In that window that comes up, you can also specify how to shorten new Category values longer than 20 characters (the maximum length for them in DONATION). The window also comes up if previously-used associations of longer categories to existing categories are being used.

•Added a new Database ⇒ Merge Duplicate Donation Categories menu option and window, for changing all donations with one category into another category, and then deleting that first category.

•Added a Help topic on Importing Donors and Donations from One File. These instructions can be used if you need to import files containing both donor and donation information on the same line. This would often be because they were exported from online donation processing services, such as CanadaHelps.org.

•In the Database ⇒ Merge Duplicate Donors window, changed the sort on the displayed donors to be case-insensitive, to match the order in the main window's Donor List. (Previously a donor with a last name starting with a lower-case letter would sort to the bottom of the list on this window.)

•Made a fix that should prevent problems that a few users were having, who were using the built-in rather than mail-merge receipts. It occurred when they used certain Receipt menu options. If they were somehow able to quickly close the main window after the print (for Current Donor Original Quick Print) or after closing the window displaying the receipt for other options, the program could crash with a message about "Null object reference at line ... in ue_..._receipt of object w_donation". Fortunately even when that happened the receipt was both printed (for Current Donor Original Quick Print) and saved OK!

•Fixed an unintentional limitation to deleting donors. The rule is that you cannot delete a donor who has donations in the current year. However, if you chose an option on the Donations tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options to display further years of donations on the main window, and the selected donor had displayed donations in other years (but none in the current year) you were still prevented from deleting it. Now that is allowed, as it should be, with a message explaining that this does not affect the donor in other years.

•For Canadian users, if you enter or edit what the Canada Revenue Agency calls a donation with advantage (one where you enter both a Total Amount and an Eligible Amount), and the donation is receiptable, and the advantage (the difference between those two amounts) is more than 80% of the Total Amount, you will now receive a warning saying that the donation should probably be marked non-receiptable. You will not receive warnings about previously entered donations where this is an issue, unless you edit them.

•For Canadian users, if you enter a Gift in Kind that has a value of at least $1,000, and have not entered appraiser information (which may be required by the Canada Revenue Agency), you will now be prompted to do that.

•For users in countries other than Canada or the U.S.A. who checked Use A4 Paper in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, fixed seven built-in reports, plus Custom Reports in some cases (if they were printed in Portrait mode). They were cutting off a tiny bit at the right edge, and/or printing extra blank (or almost blank) pages after each page.

Release 4.33b (April 28, 2020):

•Made a technical change that should prevent a problem that a few users were having where they were shown a log file saying that the Chilkat function UnlockBundle needed to be called.

Release 4.33 (April 24, 2020):

•Made some improvements to both the messaging in the program, and the relevant Help topic about Gmail problems, when you are configuring email sending for a Gmail account and it doesn't work at first. Also improved the Help and the program's messaging about email configuration problems for several other email services, which either need or might need you to set up a special "application password" for use only with this program.

•Added a capability to the «if:FIELDNAME» mail-merge field, which included the following text (up to an «else» or «endif») only if the value of that named field was non-empty, or for amount-type fields, not $0.00. You can now also specify it as «if:FIELDNAME=VALUE», which will include the text only if the value of the field is exactly the same as the value you enter after the equals sign. (For amount-type fields, that value has to be shown in your standard currency display format, such as $100.00.)

•Fixed a possible problem when you are displaying multiple years of donations on the main window (as set by an option on the Donations tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options). If the current donor had donations in other years for which the donation categories were not present in the current year (for instance, because you deleted them), they would show up as just a number, not their description. Now the description will always show up properly in such cases.

•Fixed a bug for users logging in with the Limited User Password, running the Reports ⇒ One Date Donation report: if the Donation Details checkbox was unchecked, checking it would cause a techie error message and the program would crash.

Release 4.32c (April 16, 2020):

•Prevent a techie error message, that starts with "Getting lastmodified date and time for file ... failed" in mail-merge activities, including using either the Edit or Merge buttons in Letters ⇒ One Letter or Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing, if a file is not in an expected directory. (Fortunately that message was harmless and the process continued successfully in any case.)

Release 4.32b (April 10, 2020):

•Fixed a bug in the new Batch Entry features that allow for multiple batches on the same day. If you had already saved one batch with a description, then went back to update further on that same date, but left the In Batch drop-down showing the default of "All", then if you entered any new donations in the main batch entry window that comes up, it would fail on a Save, with an error about "violation of FOREIGN KEY constraint".

•Changed the default for the In Batch drop-down in the Batch Entry options window for a given date that already has had batches saved for it to be the last batch saved, rather than "All". Made the same change to the default Batch shown in the options window for Reports ⇒ One Date Donation, to also show the last batch saved. Explained all of this better in the Help topics for Batch Entry and for those reports.

Release 4.32 (April 9, 2020):

•Renamed two of the versions of DONATION to better describe them: the Standalone version is now called Standard, and the Web Network version is now called Remote Database. This does not affect their features in any way, just their names!

•Fixed a bug in the new Batch Entry features that allow for multiple batches on the same day, each with its own Description. Somehow if you created more than one named batch, it was erroneously merging the 2nd and further ones on a day into the first one, ignoring the fact that you had given them new Descriptions. The 2nd and further Descriptions were not saved at all.

•Fixed a problem that was causing every new release to reload the original mail-merge templates provided with the program, whether or not they had been updated. (That reload would not affect any of your edited templates.) However, the fix will actually only take effect starting on the next release after you install this one (or after the next one you install).

•Fixed a problem that could cause incorrect error messages when installing the Local Network Client version, where the installation program could give an incorrect message about needing to upgrade the Local Network Server version first, when it had already been upgraded.

•Organization Names with leading or trailing spaces in the name can cause problems with license keys not matching properly, so we made a couple of small changes to prevent and/or fix that.

•Added a message to the installation programs, to give an error message and ask for confirmation if you were trying to install an older version on top of a newer version. However, that will only take effect if the older version being installed on top of the newer one is this version or later.

Release 4.31c (March 14, 2020):

•Removed restrictions about memorizing One Date Donation reports, and replaying existing memorized ones, imposed by release 4.31b:

oThey can be memorized and replayed again.

oOnes memorized in releases prior to 4.31 can be replayed again.

oWhen you replay memorized ones, the options window will show up with the correct options selected, and with all of the checkbox options greyed out so that they cannot be changed. That ensures that you are replaying the report with the same options that you originally memorized.

oThe one thing that could not be fixed is that ones memorized using exactly release 4.31 will likely not work properly, because they did not correctly memorize the desired options in the new options window. They will always try to replay the simplest Details-only report with no additional columns.

Release 4.31b (March 10, 2020):

•Fixed bugs about the One Date Donation reports:

oOne bug prevented them from working from the Reports Browser, after the changes made in release 4.31. They did work from the main Reports ⇒ One Date Donation menu option.

oAnother bug was that previously memorized One Date Donation reports would have crashed the program. Now you get a message saying that that memorized report can no longer be used, and you should recreate it or just run your desired One Date Donation report directly.

oThe final problem is that if you memorized new One Date Donation reports, they would not necessarily display the same report when you tried to replay them, and any Sort or Filter saved with them might not work, because the options in the new options window for those reports are not saved. So those reports can no longer be memorized. (That restriction was eliminated in the next release, but this was the only quick fix available to eliminate this potential problem.)

•Removed an apparently incorrect restriction (added in release 4.24b) stopping the Local Network Server version from backing up to mapped network drives. The Local Network Client version still cannot write to mapped drives on the server (which is making the backups), for technical reasons. Also, trying to do that now gives a nice error message explaining that that doesn't work, rather than a techie error window.

•Prevented a way where you could end up with a database that thinks it is working on year number 0 (rather than the current calendar year) when you first set up a new database.

•That previous fix also prevented a very obscure and unusual problem where on a startup to the program, you get a message "Cannot update CONSTANTS table with your working year number". In addition, if this problem had already happened, there is a fix in this version that handles it.

Release 4.31 (February 25, 2020):

•Eliminated all of the sub-menu options under Reports ⇒ One Date Donation. Clicking that menu option now brings up a window that allows you to pick various options, to indicate which sections of the report you want included, and which additional columns you want included.

•Added two new versions of reports under Reports ⇒ One Date Donation, that were not previously available. They are ones with both a Details section and a Summary section, that show the donation Description column.

•Changed the Email field in the Donor Details area of the main window to allow multiple semicolon-separated emails to be included in that field. The same change was made in the Email field in the window for sending emails to arbitrary people (used for emailing backups, for emailing reports saved with the Save As button, and a few other places). For instance, "john@gmail.com;mary@hotmail.com", without the quotes, would now be a valid entry. When entries like that are used, any emails sent to the the people listed in that field will go as one email, with the To line for the email including both email addresses. That includes when you are emailing receipts or letters to donors, and when you right-click on a Donor's email field on the main window and pick Send Email from the pop-up menu.

•Updated the Help topic Move the Program from One Computer to Another to include a much shorter simplified instructions section to cover the simplest cases.

•Added some messages to help catch weird situations that have happened to a few users, where their database was messed up in a way that making a backup then immediately restoring that backup would fix. (Please do not try that yourself unless we advise you to do so.)

Release 4.30 (February 18, 2020):

•Added the capability to give names to batches entered with Batch Entry. That will be of particular interest to churches who have multiple services on one day and want to be able to report on them separately. That affects the Batch Entry windows, and also the One Date Donation reports which now allow you to select a batch on a given date. A Batch field was also added to the Donation fields column in Custom Reports. If you don't want to use this feature, you can turn it off by unchecking "Use Batch Descriptions" in the Donations tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window.

•In the built-in receipts, and template mail-merge receipts, the heading "Summary by Category" above that summary table at the end of the receipt now has the donor's name added, so it will read for instance "Summary by Category for John Smith".
If you are using mail-merge receipts and have edited that template, you would have to make that change yourself by editing the template accordingly, for instance by adding "for «Name»", without the quotes, after where it says "Summary by Category".

•For the built-in Canadian receipts for with Advantage (including ones for Quebec), we have removed the Summary by Category section at the bottom of the section for the donor to keep. There was no benefit to that, because such receipts are always for only one donation, and the Details Table that is still included in those receipts has the same details. (Our mail-merge templates for such receipts did not include the Summary by Category table.)

•Changed the Database ⇒ Copy Addresses menu option to also copy email addresses as well as the 4 fields for the postal address.

•If you have the Local Network Version of DONATION, and you have multiple databases, and an Organization Short Name in the Database ⇒ Switch Databases window on the Local Network Server version contains a non-ASCII character (such as an accented character), the Local Network Client version was previously unable to use that same menu option to switch databases. Making any small change then re-saving the entries in the Local Network Server version may now fix this. If not, the message that the Local Network Client version now gives when you try that is much more informative and tells you what the problem is and how to fix it.

•Fixed a bug in the Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors menu option: it wasn't copying the Middle Initial field.

•The Help ⇒ Email Software4Nonprofits.com menu option now gives a choice between using your default Windows email program to send the email (which is what it always did prior to this) or using a plain-text form within the program to do so.

•Fixed a bug in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations window, where if a donor was not found with a given Member/Envelope # from the first column of the import file (which cancels the import), the error message said the error was on line 0 of the input file, rather than stating the correct line number.

•Improved some messaging around the automatic retrieval versus manual requesting of license keys. Also changed the Evaluation and Licensing window to normally automatically close after a successful request of a license key or of an evaluation extension.

•Each page of this Help now has a footer that tells when it was last updated. However, for technical reasons, all pages will initially show as December 10, 2019 if they have not been updated after that.

Release 4.29 (January 30, 2020):

•Fixed a bug: if you are using mail-merge receipts, using Receipt ⇒ Current Donor Sample will fail to display the "Sample Only" watermark on, which is needed to make it clear it is a sample and should not be sent to the donor.

•When you are displaying a report and click Print, the printer dialog box gives you an option to select only a range of pages to print. If you do that, and when that is done, click Save PDF, previously it would automatically only save the same range of pages to your PDF file. Now it will ask you whether you want to save the same range, or all pages.

•Made a change to the installation program that should fix the very infrequent errors where the program cannot properly access 3rd-party controls installed with it, leading to error messages such as "Cannot connect to global object in ChilkatAx-9.5.0-win32.dll ...".

Release 4.28c (January 28, 2020):

•Clarified the wording of the windows prompting for the receipt issued date when you run the Reports ⇒ Receipt ⇒ Mailing Labels report or the Reports ⇒ Receipt ⇒ Envelopes report. Also, in both of those windows, the displayed date will now default to the latest issued date of receipts for the current working year, and they will verify that any other date you enter is a date on which receipts were issued, in the current working year.

•Prevented a possible but infrequent crash of the program when using the Receipt ⇒ Current Donor Original Quick Print menu option with mail-merge receipts, with a message like "Error at line 10 in mf_adjust_menus event of m_web_browser ...", appearing after the receipt has printed.

Release 4.28b (January 24, 2020):

•Fixed a problem introduced by version 4.28 where after the installation, when you first ran DONATION, you could get errors like "Cannot open loaded HTML file ... for writing. Access is denied."

Release 4.28 (January 24, 2020):

•Resolved problems with mail-merge templates into which images were pasted directly with Cut or Copy and then Paste, rather than being inserted with the Insert menu option in the editor. Such pasted-in images could cause the program to crash. Any such images will now be replaced with "IMAGE REPLACED", and you will be given a message explaining that and what to do about it.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Summary by Dollar Ranges to bring up an extra prompting window that allows you to change the dollar ranges it reports on.

•Added some additional warnings in a number of help topics about the fact that exporting reports to formatted Excel (with the Save As button) can be imperfect.

•Made it clear in the text of the Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing window, and in the Help for that window, that the checkbox that allows filtering the data before merging or exporting also allows sorting it.

•Made it clear in the Help on the Receipt ⇒ Filtered Donors window that matches on the Other Info fields are case-insensitive (upper or lower case doesn't matter) and that they search within the field contents (they don't have to match the entire field).

•Fixed a completely harmless problem in the full installation programs (for versions other than Lite) where if you repeatedly ran the same installer, each time you ran DONATION after the install it might tell you it was loading new or updated original letters files. (Reloading them was harmless, and would not overwrite any versions of those letters that you had edited.)

•Made a change in the full installation programs so that a reinstall will fix things, if you get a message "Error at line 50" and then the program crashes when you click the Select Logo and Signature button (or messages about licensing at some points after that) in Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options. (We think that problem can happen after certain major Windows Updates.)

Release 4.27 (January 17, 2020):

•Made some changes in many original mail-merge receipt templates delivered with the program (specifically, ones for Canada - English, French or Bilingual), that will mean that the box border around the Eligible Amount merge field still looks right if you change the font size of that field.

•For the full installers other than for the Lite version, added in the installation of a file needed for conversion of databases from newer versions of Membership Plus, in case it is needed. Previously, if you needed to do such a conversion, DONATION would prompt you to download and install that file, which could be error prone.

•Revised the Help topics on Exporting Data from the Program, Generating Mailing Labels or Envelopes using Microsoft Word, and Doing Mail Merges using Save As from Reports.

•Improved the wording of the email sent with Email Backups about how to restore the backup.

Release 4.26e (January 6, 2020):

•Fixed a bug when copying data to a new year with the Maintenance ⇒ Change Year menu option: If you were entering Middle Initials in their own field (using the new capability to do that, first available in release 4.18), they were not copied from the previous year's donor details to the new year's donor details. If you already did that copy to the new year, and you had been entering Middle Initials in their own field already, there are two ways that you can fix that:

a.If you had not yet made any changes to donor or category information in the new year, and had not yet entered any donations in the new year, just delete that new year with the Database ⇒ Delete Latest Year menu option. Then upgrade to this release, if you have not already done so, and redo the creating of the new year in Maintenance ⇒ Change Year.

b.If that option will not work for you, and it is the year 2020 that didn't get Middle Initials copied into it, please contact us for a SQL Updating Password and SQL statement and instructions for fixing the problem, by copying Middle Initials from 2019 to 2020.

•Fixed a problem that a few users had encountered where they could see an error about "Error retrieving a donor's latest donations" in the Batch Entry window, which could lead to new donations entered there not being saved.

Release 4.26d (January 3, 2020):

•Made more changes to new signature editing possible from the window reached by clicking Select Logo and Signature on the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, to correct some positioning calculations if you scroll the image. It also now allows for snipping images 15 or 20 times the minimum desired size (previously only up to 10 times was available). Also improved some of the Help for the signature image, particularly the paragraph specifying how to scan a signature image.

•The following changes were actually parts of Release 4.17 and 4.19, but we failed to note them in the Help until now. The Database ⇒ Import ⇒ All Data menu option now expects two additional fields in the file for importing donations, the Title and Middle Initial, coming after the First Name field. And it expects one additional final field in the file for importing donations - the Description. (Those points were also not mentioned in the Help topic for that menu option until now.)

Release 4.26c (December 28, 2019):

•Made a small improvement to the new signature editing possible from the window reached by clicking Select Logo and Signature on the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, to better handle things if your initial signature image to be edited is actually already quite small.

Release 4.26b (December 28, 2019):

•Fixed a problem introduced by release 4.26 where the program could crash when you clicked Select Logo and Signature on the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window.

Release 4.26 (December 27, 2019):

•Added new features in the window for selecting Logo and Signature Images, for automatically fitting logos into an appropriate image size, and snipping signatures out of a scan you have made, at an appropriate image size. In almost all cases, this should eliminate the need to use graphics editing programs for those purposes.

•Fixed a bug in many original mail-merge receipt templates delivered with the program, that could push the signature image and name, and any text under them, too far to the right so they get cut off a bit when printed or saved to PDF. Also when existing edited templates are loaded for editing or running a merge to create a receipt, if they have the same problem, it will likely be fixed automatically.

•When running reports (other than to print actual envelopes), your paper size will now always be set to Letter, unless A4 paper size was set in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, in which case it will be A4. This will override any default paper size set for your printer in Windows.

•For users in countries other than Canada or the U.S.A. who have selected A4 Paper in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, fixed a bug that caused printing of Envelopes (as with Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Envelopes) to print on A4 paper instead of #10 envelopes.

•Added the function "IF" to the function selection box for complex sort expressions, and added an explanation of to that Help topic.

•Fixed a bug: For users in countries other than Canada or the U.S.A., the text in a built-in receipt that said things like "Official receipt for the year 2019" could have half of the last character ("9" in this case) cut off when you saved it to PDF, including if you emailed it.

•Did a complete spelling and grammar check of this Help file, and made lots of small corrections.

Release 4.25b (December 5, 2019):

•Added a checkbox in the Database ⇒ Merge Duplicate Donors window, to allow you to only do the merging in the current working year, rather than the usual default of doing it in all years in which those donors appear in your database.

•Fixed a further unlikely but possible way (beyond what was fixed for Release 4.24d) where users in Canada or the U.S.A. could incorrectly have their printing (and saving to PDF) using the A4 paper size instead of Letter. (A4 is a size used in many countries other than Canada and the U.S.A.) If you are in a country with that A4 paper size, you can set it yourself as an option in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window.

•Improved the message you get on startup, if the program thinks your screen resolution may not be sufficient to show the program's main window and other windows.

•Fixed a bug in an internal function in the program that determined whether you were running the Local Network Client version, that could think that was the case if you were running the Remote Database Version. The only place we are aware this affected is when you used the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates menu option in the Web Network Version - it would ask you an inappropriate question about whether you had first updated the Local Network Server version.

•Made some changes to the logic about when revised mail-merge letter and receipt files are loaded into the database, where they are actually stored for use.

Release 4.25 (November 28, 2019):

•Added a "Hide SQL Text on Next Window" checkbox to the Custom Reports window, which causes the next window that comes up to hide the generated SQL rather than displaying it as usual.

•Added a new section to the end of the Help topic Generating Receipts using Mail Merge, titled "Generating Receipts with Multiple Mail-Merge Template Files".

•Fixed a bug that a few users were encountering where they were trying to use a mail-merge letter or receipt, and they got a message such as "The original HTML file ... has not yet been stored in database." Now as long as that file actually exists, it should be stored in the database for you in that situation, and the program will be able to use it.

•Fixed a bug in the Mail Merge Editor, where the Insert ⇒ Page Break sub-menu options would either appear to not work at all, or might make all or part of the existing document disappear.

•Fixed another bug in the Mail Merge Editor, where sometimes if you edited with an external editor (such as the option to do so with Notepad), when you returned to the editor and it prompted you to reload the changed document, there could be odd messageboxes or error messages after you answered Yes to that.

•Changed all original mail-merge letter and receipts files in a way that clicking Ctrl+Home in the editor would get you to the outside of the table at the top of the document, rather than inside it. That way you could press Enter, and then add something above that table. Previously the only way to get something at the top was with the Insert ⇒ Page Break ⇒ At Start of Document menu option, which might not be what you wanted (a page break), or by using an external editor. These updated original versions will only be installed by full installation programs downloaded from the DOWNLOAD web page, not if you use Tools ⇒ Check for Updates in the program.

Release 4.24d (November 25, 2019):

•Corrected an error when new databases are being initialized (either for a first install, or if you are creating them for Switching Databases) where the program incorrectly decided to default your paper size for reports to A4 instead of Letter. (A4 is a size used in many countries other than Canada and the U.S.A.) If you are in a country with that A4 paper size, you can set it yourself as an option in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window.

•Corrected the fact that the version 4.24c installation programs, excluding the full Standalone installer, were accidentally not "code signed". As a result, when you downloaded them, your browser and/or anti-virus software might be more suspicious of them, saying they are from an "unknown vendor". or words to that effect. (They were still OK though!)

•This version was created with a new version of the script used by our installation program builder. (This is primarily a note to ourselves. The new version is "daAll.suf".)

Release 4.24c (November 21, 2019):

•Corrected an error if you downloaded a Web Network Version database to become a local database, with the Upload/Download ⇒ Download Web Database to Local menu option, as part of converting back to a local version such as Standalone. This version fixes that, even if the download has already been done and you have switched to Standalone.
(Technical details for our internal memory: It had failed to grant appropriate permissions to a newish database stored procedure named sp_generate_name, and to a new database table MEMORIZED_DONATIONS, which could lead to error messages about those objects, and perhaps crashes of the program, likely harmless.)

Release 4.24b (November 20, 2019):

•The program has never been able to successfully restore a backup from a mapped network drive. Now it has a clear error message about that, with instructions of what to do about it (copy the file to your local computer then restore it), rather than a more technical one that just says it cannot open the backup file to be restored. Also changed the previous messaging and Help file information for if you were trying to use a UNC path (like \\othercomputer\c\...) to also state that you have to copy the file to your local computer in order to restore it.

•Updated a number of Help pages, including Multiple User Options, to reflect the fact that we are discontinuing the one simultaneous user Web Network Version option. (The five simultaneous user Web Network Version will still be available.) We are doing this because we believe that when you only need one user at a time accessing a shared database, the Standalone version with the Cloud Storage Service is a much better option than the Web Network Version, because it is much faster, and potentially cheaper.

•Made a minor revision to the Database ⇒ Validate menu option so that for the Web Network Version, there is not a significant delay caused by reloading the main window when the validation is finished. A similar coding change was made to the Backup/Restore ⇒ Backup Database menu option, which will not be obvious to users because that menu option is not needed (or available) in the Web Network Version.

Release 4.24 (November 12, 2019):

•Added a new feature allowing you to memorize recurring donations, for automatic insertion on a weekly or monthly schedule.

•The Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors menu option now has another option, to just copy the currently selected donor in the current year to one or more other years, if it is missing in those years. Previously the only option was to copy all missing donors.

•The Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window now has an option, that applies to all emailing of receipts, letters or emails to donors, "Bcc: to yourself". If you check that, all emails sent to donors will have a Bcc (blind copy) to your email address that the emails are sent from, so you can have a copy of each email.

•Prompts for dates or date ranges for reports now have different messages if you enter a date outside of the current working year (or fiscal year, where appropriate). The new messages tell you to use Maintenance ⇒ Change Year to see reports for a different year.

•Made a change to the mail merge editor (which is behind the scenes an Internet Explorer web browser window) that may allow more modern HTML to work in documents, if you edit them manually (for instance with the Edit in Notepad option in the editor).

•Fixed a bug in Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors: problems with the lengths of fields, that could be truncated (shortened) to fit into the program's allowable field lengths, were being treated as errors preventing the import, rather than just information. Now those types of errors can still allow an import to be done.

•Fixed a few things that users starting the program with the Limited User Password had been allowed to do, but should not have been allowed to do: Use the Correct button for donations, and edit the Advantage Description column for existing donations, if it was being displayed.

•Fixed the fact that the Help button in the Calculator window didn't go the right help page.

•Did a significant re-write of some common program code shared between our two programs DONATION and ACCOUNTS, leading to related changes in the code that is unique to each program. This is not intended to change any program behaviour. (This note is primarily for our own memory of when this was done, since this should not affect users of the software. The technical change was to stop injecting global variables into program objects.)

Release 4.23 (October 16, 2019):

•The Cloud Storage Service now requires an email address for notifications to be set on each computer running DONATION, which should be the email address of the main user DONATION on that computer. You will be prompted for it when you first use this (or a later) version, if it has not yet been set up, and it can also be set or changed in the Backup/Restore ⇒ Backup Frequency and Options window.

•Release 4.22 used a significantly re-written installation program. Various problems were found with it since then, and new versions of the installers were uploaded between these releases. This release includes fixes for all known problems so far.

Release 4.22 (October 7, 2019):

•Added Reports ⇒ Fiscal Year ⇒ Non-Receiptable and Pre-Receipted Donations and Reports ⇒ Fiscal Year ⇒ Unreceipted Donations, which are just like Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Non-Receiptable and Pre-Receipted and Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Unreceipted, respectively, but for the current fiscal year.

•Fixed a bug in Batch Entry: for full users who aren't displaying the Member/Envelope # field, or for Limited users who can't see donor names, the "Count Cash" button that should have been at the bottom left was either invisible, or moved so far left that only the last two characters, "sh", were visible on it.

•Fixed a bug: If Canadian users used the Report Browser to run the DONATION REPORTS ⇒ Unreceipted report, they did not get the correct version of it that included the Notes column, as they would do if they ran it with the menu option Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Unreceipted. (That column isn't needed for non-Canadian users.)

•Simplified the installation of the Local Network Client version of the program: you no longer have to enter the full pathname to the database file. Also improved error handling on connection errors when running that version. Those improvements include now having the option to prompt for a changed Local Network Server computer name from the program itself, which could previously only be done by re-installing the Local Network Client.

Release 4.21 (September 17, 2019):

•Added a new control Show Donations on the Donations tab of Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options, with the options "Only Current Year", "Also One Prior Year", or "All Years". This determines how many years of donations are shown with each donor on the program's main window. Until now the behaviour has always been the same as the default option, "Only Current Year". If additional years are shown, they are only for your information: you cannot edit them or delete them there.

•Moved Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Current Donor and Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Current Donor History to be on a new Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Current Donor sub-menu, with the previous Current Donor report now named Current Year Details on that sub-menu, and the previous Current Donor History report now named History (Annual Totals). Added a new 3rd report All Years Details to this new sub-menu. It lists all donations for the current donor in all years.

•Added Reports ⇒ Fiscal Year ⇒ Receipted Donations, which lists all receipted donations for a range of dates within your fiscal year.

•For Custom Reports with retrieval parameters (ranges of dates and optionally a category), or for SQL Selects where the codes for those retrieval parameters are used, if you are displaying the report in the standard Normal report style (not Grid), there is now an extra line in the report's header, showing the values of the retrieval parameters you entered (for instance, "Donations between Jan 1, 2019 and Dec 31, 2019 for the category General").

•Fixed two bugs in receipts introduced in release 4.18: both Quebec (French only) regular receipts, and Quebec (bilingual) Gift in Kind receipts with Advantage (Eligible Amount entered) would fail, with errors including saying that there was no column named "donor.NAME_W_MIDDLE".

•Improved the messaging if you have a memorized report that you memorized after using the Save SQL button to save its SQL to a file, editing that SQL, then reloading it with the Load SQL button, and then when you run the memorized report the saved SQL no longer works. (That would most likely because we have changed the definition of that built-in report in a newer release of the program.) Also improved the error messages if you are just viewing a non-memorized report and use Save SQL, edit, and Load SQL, and the loaded SQL doesn't work.

•Fixed a problem where the Load SQL button failed if there were any double quotes (") in the SQL.

•Made some internal changes to the Report Browser, that could lead to it being more efficient, particularly for users of the Web Network Version.

Release 4.20b (September 4, 2019):

•Changed the installation program so it will no longer install on Windows XP (which Microsoft stopped regular support for in 2009) or Windows Server 2003 (which Microsoft stopped regular support for in 2010). Because of this lack of support for security fixes, we do not feel it is at all safe to continue using these versions of Windows, and in addition, some time back we started using some functions in the program that do not exist in those versions. The program can be installed on all later versions of Windows: Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10 or later, or Windows Server 2008 or later.

Release 4.20 (September 3, 2019):

•Added the menu option Receipt ⇒ Current Donor Original Quick Print. It is just like Current Donor Original, but it immediately prints the receipt to your default printer and closes the receipt-viewing window, without letting you look at it first. The only messaging is to tell you the receipt number and that it has sent it to your default printer. This is particularly useful for high-pressure situations in which you have to do a lot of data entry of individual donations and create each receipt immediately after making the entry.

•Made two improvements to Custom Reports:

oThere is a new Include All Donors checkbox above the Donor columns list. If you check that, and you are including both Donor and Donation fields, your resulting report will include any donors that have no associated donations, where previously, or if you do not check that, only donors with donations were included.

oReports that include either the Envelope # column (which might alternatively be called Member #) or a full Name column (not just individual partial name fields like First Name) will be sorted on that Member/Envelope # if it was selected, or else the donor's reversed name (like "Smith, John"). Previously except in very limited circumstances Custom Reports were not sorted at all initially.

•Changed all of Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Receipted, Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Non-Receiptable / Pre Receipted, and Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Unreceipted to also show the Eligible Amount values if that field is being shown in your Donation Details area (as specified in the Donations tab of the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window).

•When you run a report that has selection criteria (such as a range of dates) and get the message "There is no matching information for this report", you now get an additional message telling you that you can click the Rerun button to try again with different criteria.

•Fixed an unintentional recent change to the sort orders in Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Donation Info ⇒ Sort by Member/Envelope #, Reports ⇒ Donor ⇒ Addresses by Member/Envelope Number, and Reports ⇒ One Date Donation ⇒ Details with Member/Envelope # (and the variations of that one with an added Summary or Description). Previously in those reports, all donors with Member/Envelope numbers came first in the report, in order by that number, then all of them with no such number, in alphabetical order. That had accidentally been changed to put all of the ones with a number last, instead of first. That is now fixed.

•In a number of reports (and mail-merge tables) that list donation details, added the donation category name to the sort order, after the existing sort orders. So for instance if before this release a report was sorted by Name then Date, and could thus end up randomly sorted within one name and date by Category, now it is sorted by Name, Date and Category.

•Made some fixes for computers with a 2nd monitor attached:

oFor the windows that remember their last-used size and position when you next use them (including the program's main window and reports-viewing window), if you had moved the window to that 2nd monitor, it will again come up there when you next open it.

oIt takes care of the case where you last had such a window on the 2nd monitor, then unplugged that 2nd monitor from your computer and used the window again: it puts the window back onto your main screen.

oIt could still be a problem if you last had such a window on the 2nd monitor, then turned off that monitor and forgot to turn it back on. In that case, the program will still think it can put the window on that 2nd monitor, since Windows cannot detect that the monitor is attached but turned off. So the window will just appear to not come up, and the program may appear to be hanging!

Release 4.19b (September 3, 2019):

•Put back a missing helper file (msvcp100.dll) which had somehow gone missing from the installation programs for the Lite and Local Network Client versions.

Release 4.19 (August 23, 2019):

•Fixed the width of the Add Donor window, accessed from the Batch Entry window, to accommodate the new Title and Middle Initial fields. Also fixed the fact that it wasn't properly hiding them in that window if you had chosen in Main Window Options not to have them showing.

•Changed all of Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Receipted, Non-Receiptable/Pre-Receipted, and Unreceipted to show the Eligible Amount column if you have selected to have it displayed in the Donations tab of Main Window Options.

•This release uses a new version of PowerBuilder, the program we use to build DONATION.

•Made some adjustments to converting / importing routines from other vendors' databases, given that we now have separate Title and Middle Initial fields in the donor details:

oFor converting from Membership Plus, the Middle Initial was previously added at the end of the First Name, but will now go into its own field. The Title was previously not being imported, and now is being imported into the Title field.

oFor converting from GiftWorks, the Title was previously being ignored, and is now being imported into the Title field.

oFor converting from Geminon, the Title was optionally being imported at the start of the First Name, but is now being imported into the Title field.

oFor converting from Church Assistant, no changes were made because it did not have fields for Middle Initial or Title.

oFor importing from files exported from Viansoft, no changes were made because it did not have fields for Middle Initial or Title.

Release 4.18b (August 9, 2019 - re-issued August 21 with corrections):

•Fixed a bug introduced by release 4.18, where if you hide all three of the "Member/Env #", "Title" and "Middle Initial" columns in the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window, a empty space appears in the main window between the First Name and Last Name fields.

•Fixed a bug introduced by release 4.18, where a database update fails, with an error message like "Column Unknown d1.middle_initial...", if you are updating from a release that is quite a few years old.

Release 4.18 (July 31, 2019):

•Added two new Donor Details fields: Middle Initial (abbreviated on the main window as "Mid.Init") and Title. If you don't want to use them, you can turn them off in the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window's "Show Fields" section.

•Moved the First Name field to be above the Last Name field in the Donor Details area on the main window. Previously it was below it. The Title field, if you are showing it, appears on the same line as the First Name, and the Middle Initial field, if you are showing it, appears on the same line as the Last Name. That way if you read those four fields from left to right and top to bottom, they will come out in the normal order, like Title First Middle Last. Example:
NameFieldsOnly

•Added a checkbox on the Maintenance ⇒ Main Window Options window for "Include Title in Names for Letters and Receipts". If that is checked, anything you enter in the new Title field will be automatically included in the donor's name in all receipts, all mail-merge letters, when Emailing Newsletters or Everyone, and also in the two statement-like reports, Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Details, One Page per Donor and Category Totals, One Page per Donor.

•Added a checkbox on the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window for "Include Middle Initial in Donor Names in Receipts". If that is checked, all receipts showing the donor's name will automatically include any Middle Initials you have entered. That option defaults to checked for users in Canada, because the Canada Revenue Agency requires donors' middle initials to be included on receipts.

•Added additional merge fields for mail-merge letters (but not mail-merge receipts) for the Middle Initial and versions of the Name fields including the Middle Initial. (Those additional fields are not included in mail-merge receipts because the checkbox mentioned in the previous point controls whether or not the Middle Initial is automatically included.)

•Added additional Donor fields in Custom Reports for the Middle Initial and Title, and variations of the Name fields including one or both of them.

•Changed the two statement-like reports, Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Details, One Page per Donor and Category Totals, One Page per Donor, to show the donor's address as well as their name.

•Added the ability to import the Title and Middle Initial in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors window.

•Did not at this point add the ability to import any separate Title or Middle Initial fields from any other programs that DONATION has specific importing or conversion routines for, such as Membership Plus or GiftWorks. That will be investigated and added, as appropriate, in a later release.

•Added some extra messages in the program if you are using the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option, for handling new issues we have become aware of for configuring Apple-supplied email addresses (@me.com or @icloud.com).

•Changed the installation programs so that they don't try to put the uninstallation program in a C:\Windows\Donation folder, which some users may not have permission to write files to.

•Corrected a few places in the Help where filter conditions were shown using the old-style filter expressions, to instead show the fill-in-the-blanks values used in the new Simple Filter window introduced in release 4.15.

Release 4.17 (July 10, 2019):

•Added an Edit ⇒ Select All menu option to the mail-merge editor, which selects (highlights) all of the text in the document (same as pressing Ctrl+A).

•Put back in the Backup/Restore ⇒ Restore Old Database (DONATION3.DB) menu option. Although it was only needed for conversion from version 2.70b or earlier of DONATION (released in 2007 or earlier), and almost no users should still need that, it was still occasionally coming up.

•Fixed several mailing label reports that had accidentally been changed to be sorted in order of first name then last name, instead of last name then first name like they were supposed to be.

•Changed a number of reports that showed a name with the last name first (like "Smith, John") to call that field "reversed_name" instead of just "name", in the Sort or Filter windows, for clarity. (A field called "name" should be first name first.)

•Fixed a bug where if you were viewing a report that showed the sort order in the header, clicked Sort, then clicked Cancel or pressed ESC on the sort window, the sort order would disappear from the header of the report. Also fixed a couple of other very subtle minor bugs in that window.

Release 4.16 (July 3, 2019):

•Replaced the somewhat technical Sort window for Reports and Mass Mailings with a new easier Sort window, that only shows fields that you are likely to sort on.

•Fixed a bug introduced by release 4.15, where using the Email/Print button after running Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Details, One Page per Donor or Category Totals, One Page per Donor would give an error message about the donornum and the program would exit.

•Made some further improvements to field names for filtering and sort orders on reports, as in the changes for release 4.15.

•There is now a video on the new Simple Filter window on the Demos and Samples web page.

•Changed the font size of most of the text in this Help file from 10pt to 11pt, to make it easier to read on screen or if you print out topics. (On screen, you can also zoom the help text to read it more easily, by holding down Ctrl and scrolling your mouse wheel up, or pressing Ctrl with +.

•Various small updates and improvements to the automatic configuration available for various email addresses, by using the 2nd option on the first window that comes up for the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option.

Release 4.15c (June 26, 2019):

•Fixed a bad bug in full installers downloaded from the website (but not updates done with Tools ⇒ Check for Updates) that would cause errors such as "Internal error: Internal donor [or donation] number not updated after save ...".

Release 4.15b (June 24, 2019):

•Fixed some issues in release 4.15 that could make it more likely for anti-virus programs to object to the installation. (In fact, there was absolutely nothing bad in it. We had just accidentally omitted what is called "code signing" that makes anti-virus programs trust installations more.)

Release 4.15 (June 17, 2019):

•Replaced the rather technical Filter window for Reports and Mass Mailings with a new much easier Simple Filter window.

•Reviewed all of the field names in reports available for filtering. Changed some to be clearer, and removed some that it wouldn't make sense to filter on.

•Improved sorting in most reports to prevent a problem where you add a filter, then remove that filter, and then the report ends up out of sort order.

•Added the Database ⇒ Copy Addresses menu option, for copying all addresses from one year to one or more other years. This is for use if they have been updated in the one year's donor records and you need them to be the same in other years.

•In the Web Network Version, the Database ⇒ Switch Database menu option now allows editing, such as creating a new row with a different database extension, which previously it didn't allow. The only obvious purpose for this would be if you had access to two remote databases, and wanted to switch back to a different version like Standalone, and needed to download the remote databases to two different local databases.

•The Local Network Client version of the program can now make Internet Backups.

•When you are creating receipts and there are no receiptable donations matching what the menu option you are using is looking for, the messaging has been improved to be clearer. Also fixed one bizarre problem that one user was having where there was a receiptable Gift in Kind donation but using Receipt ⇒ Gift in Kind Receipts ⇒ Current Donor Original said there weren't any, and would not generate the receipt.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Bank Deposit ⇒ Summary List so you can click on a date, and drill-down to the One Deposit Details report for that row's bank deposit.

•Changed Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ Summary by Dollar Ranges to prompt for a range of dates within the year, as well as the optional category it already prompted for, so that you can report on part of each of the current and prior years.

•Fixed Reports ⇒ Administrative ⇒ User Login History which except for the Web Network Version, was never displaying anything in the User column. Now it correctly shows the Windows username of the user who was running it.

Release 4.14g (May 23, 2019):

•Fixed a crash when starting the program for the first time if you clicked the Register Now button (in versions other than the Web Network Version).

Release 4.14f (April 17, 2019):

•Fixed a problem that prevented successful Web Network Version registrations from its Log In window, or if you are prompted to register as a first time user, for users that were not previously using another version.

•Fixed some potential problems printing Help topics with screen shots that could be too wide for the page.

Release 4.14e (April 3, 2019):

•Improved the messaging and options for Web Network Version registrations from the program to help prevent multiple independent registrations for the same organization which could cause duplicate databases. The change also allows for additional registrations for different organizations.

Release 4.14d (March 26, 2019):

•The program now detects when the current version of the licensing.dll file has not been properly updated by an update, and sends users to the DOWNLOAD page on the website to download and re-install their current version, which fixes the problem.

Release 4.14c (March 25, 2019):

•A number of users had problems running the program after doing updates to the latest versions, because the file licensing.dll was not being updated. We are unfortunately not sure why that was happening, and this update will not necessarily fix it, but at least it may give a more informative error message if appropriate, and encourage you to send us a screen shot of that message.

•Prevented a possible repeating error message, that you cannot get out of, in a very unusual circumstance when trying to make or restore a backup, if the last-used backup directory was on the C: drive and could be found or recreated for some reason.

•Fixed a problem where non-English characters could not always be successfully saved to and retrieved from the program's settings file DONATION.INI, including if they were part of things like the last-used backup directory.

•Fixed a problem when you run Reports ⇒ One Date Donation ⇒ Details, and it has more than one page. At that point, the VCR-like buttons for First Page, Prev Page, Next Page and Last Page are enabled. If you used the button at the bottom of the last page to switch to the Summary report, then used the button at the bottom of that to switch back to the Details report, the VCR-like buttons did not get re-enabled like they should have been.

•Fixed a bug in the built-in receipts for users selecting either Australia option, or New Zealand, or Other, in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, if they also checked the new checkbox for "Use A4 Paper". The bug was that the area for the logo at the top right of the receipt had a border around it, so either it would show your logo with an extra border, of if you hadn't specified a logo, it would show an unwanted rectangle there.

Release 4.14b (March 15, 2019):

•When exiting the program to install an update downloaded by the Tools ⇒ Check for Updates menu option, avoid some of the normal extra prompts that can come up when you exit the program, such as to backup, validate your database, even check for updates itself!

Release 4.14 (March 13, 2019):

•Fixed a bug when Importing Donations. If you imported a new category, donations with that category would just show a number instead of the name of that category, until you exited and restarted the program. Also, if donations were imported for the current donor, they were not displayed until you switched to another donor then back to the current one.

•Mail-merge letters emailed to donors, which are sent as attachments, now have the filename "letter.pdf" instead of "report.pdf".

•Added some code, when emailing mail-merge letters, receipts or reports, to catch and prevent a weird case where the previous saved PDF file cannot be deleted or overwritten, leading to a risk of sending the wrong letter or receipt to the wrong person.

•Added to the information that can be displayed to you when trying to configure emailing with Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration, or do emailing, if there are various sorts of problems encountered.

•Added a section on handling Donations in Multiple Currencies to the Help topic on Entering New Donations.

•Enhanced a number of error messages about bad date entry, to now show what the acceptable Short Date style from the Region settings in Windows Control Panel is (such as MM/DD/YYYY).

•When using the Database ⇒ Copy Missing Donors menu option, either directly or from a Custom Report, and the copy goes forward multiple years, the program now copies first from the most recent year to the target year, then works backwards. Previously it started copying from the earliest year to the target year, then worked forwards. That change means that you are more likely to get the most up-to-date version of missing donors in the year you are copying to.

•When using the Maintenance ⇒ Email Sending Configuration menu option, fixed the fact that the "Determine the setting from your default email program" option in the initial configuration window wasn't working if that default email program was a recent version (such as 16) of Outlook.

•Improved the handling and messaging in the situation where you run DONATION and it says that another instance of DONATION is already running.

•Renamed the mail-merge editor and viewer window's File ⇒ Page Setup menu option to File ⇒ Page Setup and Margins, to make it clear that you could set the margins there (which you always could do). Also added a couple of entries about Margins (for mail-merge receipts and letters, and for mailing labels) to the Index of this Help.

•Fixed a bug in Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations: importing of CSV files was broken (it tried to treat them as tab-separated files, and gave a message about only having 1 column instead of the desired number).

•Fixed a bug when you click the Retrieve Donations button in the Maintenance ⇒ Create Bank Deposit window, if you left the new Acct # field blank, that could in some cases give you incorrect messages about bank deposits already existing for the same date.

•Fixed a bug when creating a new database in the Database ⇒ Switch Databases menu option, that could cause the new database to get the same Unique ID for Internet Backups as the one you are switching from.

Release 4.13 (February 13, 2019):

•For Canadian users, when generating receipts (either regular, or Gift in Kind), if there are no receiptable donations of the desired type that have not yet been included in receipts, but there are receiptable donations of the other type (out of regular, and Gift in Kind), the messages about that are now clearer, telling you which menu option to use to generate those other ones.

•Corrected Reports ⇒ Donation ⇒ By Donor by Category to include donation totals from donors in the prior year that are not present in the current year's Donor List.

•Changed most of the reports under Reports ⇒ Fiscal Year, namely Donor Totals, Sort by Name, Donor Totals, Sort by Amount, Donor Totals, Sort by Member/Envelope #, Donation Details, Sort by Name, and Donation Details, Sort by Date, to all allow you to specify a range of dates within the current fiscal year, as well as an optional category, for the report. Previously all of them always worked for the entire current fiscal year.

•The program now prompts you to validate your database once a month, if you haven't done so in the last month. This is the same action that is done by the Database ⇒ Validate menu option.

•In the Reports ⇒ Custom Reports window, the radio buttons for doing the report for a Fiscal Year, which previously always did the report for the entire fiscal year, have been changed to say "For a fiscal year date range" etc., and they now prompt for a range of dates within the current fiscal year when you run the report from the following SQL Select window.

•In the Database ⇒ SQL Select window, the special codes :FISCAL_START_DATE and :FISCAL_END_DATE, which used to just force the results to be for the entire current fiscal year, now cause prompting for a range of dates within the current fiscal year.

•Removed the option "Authorize DONATION" for authorizing sending emails from the program from a Gmail address. We did that because Google recently added a lot of complex criteria to allow software companies to do that, which unfortunately seemed prohibitively complicated for Software4Nonprofits to satisfy. Instead you can use the other option, "Allow less secure applications".

•For users in countries other than Canada or the U.S.A., added an option in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window to specify that you are using A4 paper. If you choose that, both reports and built-in receipts should then fit on A4 paper, including if you save them to PDF. For comments and instructions about making this work for mail-merge receipts and letters, see this new section of the Receipt Options help page. (Note to users who use Letter size paper: some reports were changed to be a bit narrower, so they would also work on A4 paper, which is only 8 1/4" wide rather than the 8 1/2" width of Letter size paper.)

•Re-wrote the internal processing in the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donors menu option and the Database ⇒ Import ⇒ Donations menu option. Users shouldn't see many differences in the behaviour, except for a few small things:

oA "fix file" is no longer created if fixes are made for problems like too-long field values. Instead, it just displays information about the fixes in a file shown to you in Notepad.

oThat file shown to you in Notepad now contains information about both unfixable errors and warnings about things it fixed, clearly separated out into two sections if both types are present.

oIt should completely resolve the problem mentioned in the Revision History for Release 4.11d, where you are importing donations from Excel, and it can stop you because the formatting of the Amount column would have caused the numbers to erroneously be imported as $0. Now such formatting issues should not cause any problems.

•Fixed a couple of related bugs when turning on the Cloud Storage Service: if you had previous Internet backups, and the program prompted you that they appeared to be newer than your current database, and encouraged you to download the latest backup first, it would not necessarily properly do what you asked it to do (either downloading that, or not downloading that).

•Fixed a bug related to settings saved in the database: In the Tools ⇒ View Saved Settings menu option, when showing Current Database settings stored in the Database, each setting could show twice. (And the underlying problem that caused that could potentially have caused some other subtle problems with settings as well.)

•Fixed a bug when viewing mail-merged receipts or letters: If you did File ⇒ Print Preview or File ⇒ Page Setup, and then after that did File ⇒ Save PDF (or clicked the Save PDF toolbar button), it would print to the real printer instead of saving a PDF, and the little "Printing to PDF File ..." window would appear and never go away. (You could close it by clicking on the "X" at the top right!) Now, it just tells you that you cannot do a Save PDF if you already did a Print Preview or Page Setup. Previous versions already prevented you from doing a Save PDF if you did a regular Print first, again because it would fail.

Release 4.12d (January 17, 2019):

•Fixed a bug introduced in release 4.12 to Letters ⇒ One Letter and Letters ⇒ Mass Mailing, where sending Donor Information Only, Totals Donations Information or Pledge Information letters could cause the program to crash when you chose to Print the created letter or save it to PDF.

Release 4.12c (January 14, 2019):

•A few users have been having problems requesting license keys over the Internet. This seems to be due to an internal programming change made (but not noted below) in Release 4.12, that should not have affected anything, but obviously did. Undid that change so it should work for everyone.

Release 4.12b (January 14, 2019):

•A few users have been having problems requesting license keys over the Internet. This release may not fix that, but it will hopefully give them (and thus us) more informative error messages about the problem.

Release 4.12 (January 9, 2019):

•Previously, if DONATION was already running, you could not start a restore of a database backup or emailed backup, by opening or double-clicking such files. Now those actions do work if DONATION is already running.

•When you create bank deposits, you can now specify the Account Number for the Bank Account, and it will print on both the report and the deposit slip.

•For multi-user versions (Local Network Version, and Web Network Version with more than one simultaneous user allowed), previously when one user was creating a receipt, no other user could do so, to prevent problems with inconsistent or missing receipt numbers. Now, as soon as that first user has printed the receipt, saved it to PDF, or emailed it, another user can get in to create other receipts. (If the first user does none of those things, other users are still blocked until the first user exits the window where they are viewing the receipt.)

•Fixed a few cases when you have turned off the display of both the Details Table and the Summary Table in the Maintenance ⇒ Receipt Options window, where it would always print a blank 2nd page. The only remaining problem like this is for the Quebec (Bilingual) receipts, which at this point unfortunately we cannot fix. (For those Quebec users who don't want either table, switching to the mail-merge version of the receipts, and editing the receipt template to remove those sections, may allow you to have it be just one page with no blank page.)

•If you have displayed the Report Browser once, then make some changes to memorized reports (in the Memorized Reports window, or with the Memorize button in the report-viewing window or the SQL Select window), previously if you then went back to the Report Browser, and looked at the memorized reports there, they would not be changed appropriately based on what you had done. Now that is fixed.

•Fixed a bizarre bug in Reports ⇒ One Date Donation ⇒ Details with Member / Envelope # and Summary: If you added a Sort to it, or a Filter (which would only affect the details section, not the summary section), one or both of the summary sections at the bottom might get cut off.

This topic was last edited on Dec 27, 2023

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