Document generation (also acknowledged as document creation, document automation or document assembly) software lets you transform text-based records (generally, MS Word and PDF files) into compelling, productive formats defined as templates.
Document creator software helps create personalized, transaction-ready documents in record time. Document creation templates not only decrease the time it takes to produce a new document, but they also help enhance the document's quality by excluding any human flaws that occur with manual editing.
A document creation template (ready-for-use) can remain in a library of other relevant templates. When a developer or user picks the template from the list, they will be given options like:
“Would you prefer to apply an existing database source (answer file)?"
Or
“Would you prefer to create a new answer file?"
If the user chooses an existing answer file, then most, if not all fields in the template would be pre-filled within formation from the chosen file. The developer can also include any important additional answers, which will then be automatically stored in the file for future use.
On the contrary, if the developer picks to create a new answer file, then they have to present all the answers in every field within the template. After which, the document creation software will use this information to generate a new, custom document.
Various software vendors address the template creation aspect in multiple ways.
Windward Studios, the leading document creation automation company, offers Windward Designer that empowers the user to transform simple text-based files and data into powerful, easily customizable document templates and deploy them in an extensive range of environments — including but not limited to the desktop, cloud, and client/server.
In contrast to other solutions in the industry, document creating software like ours affords excellent results and unparalleled user experience and our 95% customer retention rate stands as a witness.
You don't have to be a professional document creator to take advantage of our document template creator. In fact, you don't require any core training as the templates can be created and edited using your all-time favorite platforms like MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to include the specific design elements you need — rotation spacing, custom pages, graphics and more. Also, smart in-line data tags introduce conditional logic to personalize your output to suit your unique document requirements.
Even non-technical users can introduce intricate business logic into the template. On the other hand, developers can harness similar components to create an interactive source (Q&A forms, conditional logic, charts, and more) for the template. For similar documents, Windward enables users to share and apply components across multiple templates. This smart feature ensures you can create various documents using a single data source.
Learn more about how Windward's document automation software works.
Users will enjoy smart document reusability as the document designer empowers you with the capability to import and use templates as sub-templates. Windward's data wizards make it super simple for even non-IT users to come up with data queries from the source of their choice with easy drag-and-drop options.
In conclusion, you can create new templates for your documents in a matter of minutes, so you can speed up your business activity like never before. In other words, Windward Designer helps streamline your document creation process which results in great savings and the workflow becomes seamless and super swift.
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Know more about Windward and get your 14-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
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.
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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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).
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.
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.
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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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.
