One Tuesday, the CFO, Priya, needed a live cross-tab of sales by region and product category for a 9 AM board meeting. She asked Marco at 8:15 AM. Marco sighed, ran a manual report from TopSpeed, exported to CSV, cleaned up the column headers, and emailed it at 8:55 AM. The data was already 12 hours old.

If you have a TopSpeed/Clarion application, search for a certified TopSpeed ODBC driver (many exist). Set up a read-only DSN for reporting tools first. Then gradually connect analytics, ETL, and lightweight integrations. You’ll be amazed how much life remains in that old data.

“This is the third time this month,” Priya said. “We’re making decisions using yesterday’s news. We need a real connection.”

Marco was skeptical. “You mean my ancient .TPS files can talk to modern tools?”

Marco ran a mid-sized distribution company. For 15 years, his business ran on a custom ERP built with (Clarion). It was rock-solid: lightning-fast inventory lookups, flawless invoicing, and a reporting module that his older staff loved. The data lived in native TopSpeed files ( .TPS ).