There is no doubt about the potential of document creation automation to cut down the amount of time spent drafting different documents. This process comes with a lot of benefits, but before you implement it, there are a few questions that would need to be answered. Here is a thinking-process that your organization can adopt.
Different companies have processes that are unique to their needs. Not every document needs to be automated, especially since you will have to spend time and money getting it done. Designing a template is going to take up time and labor, so consider if in the end you will actually be saving or taking up time in the automation process. If it is a one-time document or a document that is produced rarely you don’t need automation for it.
Some documents tend to be longer than others. For example, a memorandum could be as long as 10 pages. But at the same time you may only need it once in the entire year, while a financial institution like a bank may have a loan agreement of 8 pages but they are used almost every day. This would make it more important to automate the loan contract that will be used often rather than a memo that may only be used once.
You will need to scrutinize the document you intend to create and automate, find out what features of the document tend to be repeated. You could get as many as 20 copies of the same document and then begin your analysis. Highlight the sections that need to be automated and inserted into a template.
After asking these three questions, it is time to move to action. You have identified the document to be automated and you know what sections of the document you will automate.
The next part would be to illustrate the process.
A mind map helps you to visualize the automation process, there are going to be different variables for the same document and you may want to add certain brand-specific features to the document, so it is good to sketch it so that you do not forget a feature. Also, this can help if you choose to outsource the automation.
Now the automation process comes to life and a lot of work will be involved, you can take the time and design the template yourself, or you can pay to have it done for you according to the sketch that you made earlier. There will be a number of variables that need to be included for certain documents while others may be straightforward.
The template can be designed using your favorite text editor like Word which has a good template design platform that you can use and you can choose Windward to handle the automation process. Simply feed the template into the software and you should be good to go.
You can know more about how Windward integrates with your existing software to automate the document creation process here.
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Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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SQL Select Debugger
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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Displays of all the tags in the template, structured as they are placed in the template. This provides a simple & intuitive way to see the structure of your template. Also provides the capability to go to any tag and/or see the properties of any tag.
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The ability to integrate the Windward Engine into Google’s cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications dubbed Google Applications Engine (GAE).
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If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
This new integration will allow for processing of complex scripts and bi-directional text such as Arabic. Your PDF output will be much tighter and more closely match your template, and we’ll be able to respond rapidly to PDF requests and fixes.
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Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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Version 13’s core code has been reworked and optimized to offer a reduced memory footprint, faster PDF generation and full documentation of supported features and limitations in the specifications for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
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Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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The Generate Code tool in the designer allows you to open an existing template and, with a click of a button, automatically create a window with the code needed to run your current template with all data sources and variables. Simply copy this code and paste into your application's code in the appropriate place. You now have Windward integrated into your application.
You only need to do this once. You do not do this for each template. Instead, where it has explicit files for the template and output, change that to parameters you pass to this code. Same for the parameters passed to Windward. This example uses explicit values to show you what to substitute in where.
Any pivot tables in an XLSX template are carried over to the XLSX output. The ranges in the pivot ranges are adjusted to match the generated output. So your final XLSX will have pivot tables set as expected in the generated file.
This makes creating an XLSX workbook with pivot tables trivial.
In an imported sub-template, if its properties for a style (ex. Normal) differ from the parent template's properties for the style, the use in the sub-template can be set to either use the properties in the sub-template, or the properties in the parent.
You set to retain when you don't want the child template's styling to change when imported. You set to use the parent when you want the styling of the imported template to match the styling in the parent.
Any explicit styling is always retained. This only impacts styling set by styles.
Tags can be placed in text boxes. Including linked text boxes. This gives you the ability to set the text in a textbox from your data.
Tags can be placed in shapes & smart art. This gives you the ability to set the text in a shape from your data.
When generating HTML output, the engine can either write bitmaps as distinct files the generate HTML references, or it can embed the images in the HTML providing a single file for the output.
You can place tags in pretty much any part of a template, including in footnotes & endnotes.
Any parts of a DOCX or XLSX (PowerPoint does not support this) file that are locked in the template, will be locked the same in the output.
If a font used in the template does not exist on the server generating a report, the font to substitute can be specified.
In addition, if a glyph to be rendered does not exist in the font specified, you can specify the replacement font. This can be set distinctly for European, Bi-Directional, and Far East fonts.
If you need this - it's essential. And if you don't need it, it's irrelevant.
Windward enables you to build a document by applying multiple datasources to the template simultaneously. When Windward is merging the data into a template, it processes the template by handling each tag in order, and each tag pulls from different datasources. (As opposed to processing all of one datasource, then processing the next.)
This allows the select tag to use data from another datasource in its select. For example, if you are pulling customer information from one data source, you can then pull data from the sales datasource using the customer ID of the customer presently processing to pull the sales information for that customer. If you're interested in patching together your data from multiple datasources, read this post on our blog.
