I am looking for a way to generate sample reports where I can disguise the real data so it cannot be read. I've heard of something
"Greeking". It's actually a technique meant for exactly this situation. With this technique, text is produced using random or even foreign characters. The beauty is that formatting, colors, placement all remain intact, so the printed page looks "normal" from a distance...only if you look at it carefully do you realize it's all gibberish.

Is there some way to do this in Focus?

Marian

I never tried this but how about using a special characterset like windings or greek or japanese characters.

Some people would be able to translate it back into normal characters.
You have to choose a proportional character that can be used in HTML or and in PDF

quote:

Greeking

I googled it and found this interesting article
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/representing_content...ecial_deliverable_10
You could have a directory with an entirely different but identical set of master files,
and add DEFINE's for every single numeric field:
and multiply every field by some constant.
When you want todo a 'demo' with 'fake' numbers,
just put this fake directory into the APP PATH.
When you're done, take it out.
Tedious, but might work for you.
I do this for making a presentation and my masters (the fewest things to have to modify) just redefine my data fields by name using
DEFINE UNITS/I8S=UNITS * 1.5 ;
I tried it with a &&var from the edasprof...but that' didn't work...

Wouldn't just be easier to start with random nonsense data?

You could create an excel worksheet using the Random Generator from http://ablebits.com/excel-random-generator-assistant-free-addins/index.php that mimics the real data source and use that.

The option would be to use something like ROT13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rot13) to hide the data (although if the end user has access to data for a length of time they could possibly work out the real data)

Regards

Stuart