Articles by DataSoft gives your business clear, professional, customisable reports built directly on top of your data, whether that data lives in a SQL database, an ODBC-compatible source, a REST API, or a local data file. It is built for real operational work: accurate documents, consistent formatting, and reliable output every time.
Articles is a complete environment for designing, organising, and distributing reports from one focused workspace. Browse your report library, adjust layouts to match your brand, configure interactive dialogs, and export or email results with confidence. It is not a basic drag-and-drop tool; it is a professional reporting environment built for users who need precision, repeatability, and the ability to express real business logic. Articles gives you full control over layout, data binding, expressions, scripting, and formatting so your reports behave exactly the way your business requires.
Your Workspace
Make Articles truly your own. Transform your workspace with eye-catching banner graphics that help you instantly recognise the reports and tools you use most. Articles includes a built-in banner editor, giving you the freedom to brand, personalise, and organise your environment exactly the way you want it.
Powerful search tools and a clean category list on the main page make it effortless to find what you need, when you need it. Whether you are managing dozens of reports or building new ones from scratch, Articles keeps everything clear, organised, and uniquely yours.
The Report Designer
The Articles Report Designer gives you complete control over every detail of your documents. With an intuitive visual layout surface and a clean organised workspace, you can build professional-grade reports without complexity. Drag, drop, align, and bind data with precision using a familiar Windows-style interface that feels instantly comfortable. Every panel, from the Report Tree to the Data Explorer, is designed to keep you focused and productive, whether you are customising an invoice, building a management summary, or designing a branded document from scratch.
Articles supports generating multiple distinct versions of a report in a single run, each tailored to a different audience, format, or data slice, without running the report multiple times or maintaining duplicate templates. This means one batch run can simultaneously produce a PDF summary for management, an Excel extract for finance, and individually addressed statements for every customer.
SQL Query Builder
Articles gives you the power to build complex SQL queries with ease; no syntax memorisation, no guesswork, no frustration. Its intelligent visual query designer lets you explore your data, join tables, filter results, and shape your output using a clean intuitive interface that feels more like designing than coding. Behind the scenes, Articles translates your selections into perfectly structured SQL, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and performance. You can create advanced conditions, group and sort data, preview results instantly, and refine your logic with complete confidence.
Whether you are a developer crafting sophisticated analytics or a business user assembling a custom report, Articles empowers you to work at a higher level, visually, interactively, and intelligently.
Interactive Dialogs
With more than 26 built-in dialog components, you have everything you need to design powerful interactive report workflows. Choose from lookup dropdowns, checkboxes, radio groups, date ranges, file dialogs, and many more. These controls give you the flexibility to collect exactly the information your report requires before it runs, putting the right parameters in the hands of the right people without exposing unnecessary complexity. The dialog components behave just like familiar Windows controls, making them intuitive for both developers and end users.
Scripting Engine
Unlock the full potential of your reports with the built-in scripting engine, a powerhouse feature that transforms Articles from a report designer into a complete programmable reporting platform. With scripting, you are not just designing a report; you are writing logic, intelligence, and automation directly into it.
Control every element on the page with precision. Dynamically format output, validate and correct data on the fly, calculate values, enforce business rules, and transform content before it ever reaches the page. Show or hide controls, adjust layouts, react to user input, and implement workflows that no static report template could ever achieve. This is a full programming environment living inside your report, giving you the freedom to build smarter, more responsive, and more powerful documents than ever before.
Reusable Database Connections
Articles uses a centralised connection management system, meaning your database configurations are defined once and shared across your entire report library. Adding a new report is never held up by infrastructure setup, and changing a server address or credential is done in one place, instantly reflected everywhere. Connections are stored securely with encrypted credentials, and Articles supports multiple simultaneous connections, allowing a single report to pull data from more than one database at the same time.
Articles connects to the databases your business already runs on, with no migration required:
- Sage 50 US / Actian Zen / Pervasive
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Oracle Database
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL and MariaDB
- InterBase and Firebird
- IBM DB2
- SQL Anywhere (SAP / Sybase)
- Advantage Database
- Microsoft Access
- SQLite
- Informix
- Any ODBC-compatible data source
REST API Connectivity
Articles takes reporting beyond the database with built-in REST API connectivity that opens the door to a whole new world of data. Generate reports directly from REST services, blend live API responses with traditional database fields, and deliver insights that simply are not possible with static data alone. Whether you are pulling real-time metrics, integrating with cloud platforms, or combining multiple data sources into a single unified report, Articles handles it with ease. This is not just importing data; it is orchestrating it. Articles lets you merge REST data with SQL tables, apply business rules, transform values, and produce reports that reflect the most current information your business depends on.
But Articles does not stop at reading from REST APIs. With the built-in REST API PUT/POST component, Articles becomes an active participant in your business workflows, not just a passive consumer of data. As a report runs, Articles can write data back to any REST endpoint, triggering actions, updating records, and notifying external systems in real time. Mark invoices as printed the moment they are generated, update a CRM record when a statement is dispatched, notify a warehouse system when a picking list is produced, or push summarised results to a dashboard API as part of your overnight batch run.
Full support for Bearer token, Basic, API Key, and OAuth2 authentication means Articles connects securely to virtually any modern REST service. Request bodies, headers, and endpoint URLs are all fully configurable using live report data and expressions, giving you complete control over exactly what gets sent, when, and where.
Page-by-Page Email Delivery
One of Articles’ most valuable capabilities is its Direct Email report type; a sophisticated data-driven email delivery system that goes far beyond simply attaching a report to an email and hitting send.
As Articles processes each record in your dataset, it evaluates who should receive that page’s output and builds up personalised exports per recipient. When multiple pages belong to the same email address, Articles intelligently consolidates them into a single export file rather than sending multiple emails. Your branch manager gets one clean PDF containing all their relevant pages, not ten separate attachments arriving one after another.
Dynamic subject lines and email bodies are evaluated as live expressions against your report data, so recipients see personalised subjects referencing their account number, region, or invoice total, and email bodies that greet them by name and include any contextual messaging relevant to that specific report and recipient. Nobody receives a generic subject line.
Each report template defines its own default export format and full export settings, stored within the template itself, so your invoices go as PDFs, your data extracts as Excel files, and your letters as Word documents, automatically, every time. Direct Email runs through your existing SMTP infrastructure with no third-party dependencies and no data leaving your control unexpectedly.
Task Scheduler
Articles includes a fully integrated Windows Task Scheduler, meaning your reports run automatically on whatever schedule your business demands. Overnight statement runs, weekly management packs, month-end invoice batches; Articles handles the generation, the formatting, the export, and the delivery, every time, without anyone needing to be at their desk.
Scheduled tasks support the full range of Articles report types, including direct email delivery, meaning your entire reporting and distribution workflow can be fully automated from end to end. Tasks are managed directly within Articles with a clean maintenance interface, and Articles monitors for orphaned or invalid tasks automatically on startup and shutdown.
Export Formats
Articles delivers one of the most comprehensive export suites available, ensuring your report output is always fit for purpose regardless of who is receiving it or what they need to do with it.
Document formats: PDF delivers pixel-perfect print-ready output that looks identical on every device and every printer. Microsoft Word (DOCX) is ideal for correspondence and documents recipients may need to edit. RTF provides broad compatibility across platforms where Office is not available. OpenDocument Text (ODT) ensures compatibility with LibreOffice and open-source environments. PowerPoint (PPTX) delivers report output directly into presentation-ready slides.
Spreadsheet and data formats: Microsoft Excel (XLSX) delivers live workable figures that can be sorted, filtered, and pivoted without manual re-entry. OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) provides the LibreOffice equivalent. CSV exports clean structured data that imports directly into virtually any business application, ERP, or database. XML output supports structured data exchange with downstream systems. Simple text provides lightweight universally compatible delivery for notifications and legacy systems.
Image and graphics formats: BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, EMF, and SVG exports render individual report pages as images, perfect for embedding in web applications, dashboards, or content management systems. SVG delivers infinitely scalable vector output that looks crisp at any resolution. EMF provides Windows metafile output for high-fidelity printing workflows.
Web formats: Classic HTML and modern HTML5 Div output give you clean browser-ready reports suitable for internal portals and web-based workflows.
Industrial formats: ZPL output sends report data directly to Zebra label printers, making Articles a genuine end-to-end solution for warehouse and fulfilment operations.
Every export format comes with full control over its settings, configured once within the report template and applied consistently every time the report runs. Because export settings travel with the template itself, there is no risk of different users producing inconsistent output from the same report.
Report Archive
When someone needs to revisit last month’s figures or recheck a statement that went out last quarter, Articles’ archive of prepared reports puts historical output at their fingertips instantly. No re-running, no waiting, no risk of the report producing different results against changed data; just the report exactly as it was, at the moment it was produced. Prepared reports are stored and retrievable directly from within the Articles interface, giving your team a reliable and auditable record of every report that has been generated.
Everything in One Platform
Articles brings together everything a modern business needs from its reporting in one cohesive professionally crafted platform. Connect to any database, REST API, or data source. Design reports that blend multiple data streams into a single unified output. Deliver finished results in any of over twenty export formats, automatically, on schedule, to exactly the right people. Reusable connection configurations, a fully integrated task scheduler, direct email delivery, REST read and write capability, interactive dialogs, a powerful scripting engine, and a complete report archive; all in one focused environment built to grow with your business.
Simple where it needs to be, powerful where it counts, and always focused on one thing: getting the right information to the right people, effortlessly.
Articles. Professional reporting, done properly.