It Works!

We were very thankful to receive a donation to buy a much-needed laptop for the INSTE office.  A couple of weeks ago we were able to buy a nice new one at a local store.  Since we plan to turn the INSTE office over to Hungarians one day, we bought a Hungarian computer, that is, one with a Hungarian keyboard.  It turned out that the Microsoft Office program that came with the computer did not have everything thing we needed to run the INSTE programs, so we looked around for what we needed.  It was quite frustrating, since it appeared that the necessary programs would cost over half of what we paid for the computer itself!  At this point, we stopped, laid hands on the computer, dedicated it to the Lord, asked for his blessing on it, and requested help in finding all that we needed.  After many trips to different stores, searches online, and asking advice from several people, Mike was able to find a downloadable Microsoft Office online for a reasonable price.
Then he loaded the INSTE database onto the new computer.  It worked fine until it came to the reports.  They would not work.  As he tried to find the source of the problem, he remembered that in Europe, numbers are written differently than in America.  Here, instead of a decimal point, a comma is used to separate whole numbers and tenths.  Hundreds and thousands are separated by a space, not a comma.  Mike reasoned that since the INSTE database was written in America and we were trying to run it on a European computer, the difference in how numbers are written could be the problem.  But neither of us knows how to change a computer program.
But, Mike has a language conversation partner that he meets with every week who is a programmer.  During their meeting today, Mike asked Balazs about the situation.  Balazs said the comma and decimal point difference was probably the problem and that he would be happy to look at it.  They stopped at the INSTE office at the end of their time together and Mike showed him the problem.  It took Balazs just a couple of minutes to fix it.  Wow!  We thanked Balazs profusely and paid him in cookies.  Praise God for the way he has answered our prayers!