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News of the Past Professional:
The Leader in Client Birthday Software Delivers a Groundbreaking
New Program
In 1987, Spectrum Unlimited LLC staked its claim as the
first company to apply computer technology to the idea that
people would enjoy reading about what happened on the day
they were born. Spectrum created News of the Past, a simple
DOS application, with that goal in mind. In the early days,
most of the people who bought the software intended to sell
individual birthday prints at fairs and fund-raising events.
20 years later, Spectrum Unlimited LLC is retiring the
original News of the Past and replacing it with a version
inspired by the majority of today’s News of the Past
users—professional businesspeople. News of the Past
has become an integral component of client nurturing and
marketing because of the very concept behind the original
program—people like reading about their own history.
Today’s new version takes that concept to a new level
with News of the Past Professional.
Taking Advantage of the Latest Office Technology
Spectrum has added features that take advantage of the
latest advances in the Internet, business communications,
and office technology. The savvy user has come to expect
certain functions in software, and News of the Past Professional
has them all. It now has email and PDF capabilities: You
can save greetings to a PDF file or deliver them through
your email client, singly or as a batch. The program also
now includes label printing and additional name-list sort
options.
Graphing Capabilities
Tapping into the power of Microsoft’s widely used
Office applications, News of the Past Professional provides
new graphing features that illustrate the always popular
cost-of-living data category: a then-versus-now comparison
for such items as a gallon of gas, a loaf of bread, a new
auto, a new house, average income, Dow Jones, and wages.
Displaying a graph beginning at the year 1900 and ending
with the current year, the program places a marker on the
recipient’s day of birth or whatever special date
you have chosen. This display shows where you, the individual,
enter the big picture in terms of inflation. This inflation
indicator is just one of many new features the Professional
version has to offer. It’s an ideal tool for investors,
stockbrokers, banks, insurance, and other financial services
companies.
Using the graphing feature, you can also create a custom
graph tailored to your business. All you need to do is provide
one statistic per year, and then set the colors and headings,
and you have a graph designed to illustrate your industry-specific
goal. For example, a retirement planner could graph the
cost of health-care insurance to drive home the central
question: “At this rate of inflation, will you have
enough when you retire?”
27 New Print Templates
Most users have color printers these days, so we’ve
included a library of 27 colorful print templates, and more
will be released for download from Spectrum Unlimited’s
Web site. What’s more, you can open these greeting
templates in our included desktop publisher and modify their
design as much as you like: remove data fields to make room
for marketing text, move the graphic and data fields, replace
graphics, insert customized headings, and so on.
CardWare Features
News of the Past Professional integrates the capabilities
of Spectrum Unlimited’s very successful CardWare program.
Using an ingenious greeting-card insert available from Spectrum
Unlimited, CardWare can personalize standard greeting cards
purchased from a retailer with birthday-news content. News
of the Past Professional includes this functionality.
Realizing Our Goals—and Helping You Realize Yours
Spectrum Unlimited has been listening to what you, our
users, really want from our software. We’ve incorporated
all these features and more to deliver what you have come
to expect from the leader in client birthday software.
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