AS/400 print to PC for almost free

[Al Mac <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have altered AS/400 reports to make them "Excel friendly" by removing 
sub-totals and control breaks, and making them simple lists, where the 
Excel user reinstates the breaks.

I have shown several co-workers how to get such reports into Excel or 
standard text with proportional print, but I have not been impressed with 
our overall results, that I have seen.  They work, but look horrendously 
amateurish, not appropriate to send outside the company.

I also have reports in which it is a big deal for me to do that because the 
reports in question involve a bunch of lines on each item, where the number 
of lines is unpredictable and different format, using 198 print positions 
on green bar.  I can put that report in e-mail to someone who has PC but no 
AS/400 and the result for them is unreadable.

What I want is to get it into a format that is user-friendly for a PC user 
with zero AS/400 know-how, not connected to the 400, (and also ideally not 
need much PC know-how like what it is you do to printer setup to get 
landscape print on selected reports then put it back the way it was), to 
search report for some customer name or item # or whatever, zoom in on that 
section of the report so it is readable, reprint just a few pages of the 
total report, and have it legible on their PC, without having to mess with 
Printer Setup to get landscape and other alterations just for that report.

I plan to look into Adobe Acrobat PDF onto my home PC to create the AS/400 
reports, or perhaps get some equivalent results shareware onto my home 
PC.  My home PC is Windows 98 which now talks to the work 400 via VPN over 
what is laughingly called "high speed" Internet connection.

The recipients of this would include our sales reps who deal with 
customers, and are more often away from the office than in the city of our 
company, co-workers who need to send AS/400 to a variety of customers, 
vendors, and other trading partners.  If I perfect a method after spending 
a few hundred bucks of my own money on adding stuff to my home PC, I think 
some (very few) co-workers might want to follow suit if I swear the hassle 
factor has been dramatically reduced, and the nature of the product 
involved is such that they can have like a 30+ day free trial to see if I 
am correct about the workability of the solution..

My management is utterly opposed to spending any money to get anything we 
not already have on our AS/400 model 170 V5R1, but at same time we want to 
maximize value from what we have.  We own the AS/400 outright, and dropped 
software support years ago.  We do have tech support contracts but they are 
100% if we not call the tech support place, we do not pay a dime, not even 
an annual fee.

At present, I am willing to spend a small amount of $ to install something 
on my home PC, if it will not further degrade my home PC security, which now
 uses a D-Link Router, various Norton products, a couple anti-spyware, and 
I still have security problems   At one time I was willing to spend a small 
amount of my $ to buy shareware to install on company computer, but at the 
moment I am not so inclined.  By small amount of $ I mean around $50-200 
bucks budget.

-
Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor ... see
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html