One of the hardest things for Engineers to do is examine the world from a non-technical point of view. In their earliest science classes and throughout college education Engineers are taught to ask "Why?" and never stop until the question has been answered. Perhaps that is why Engineers have such a difficult time bridging the gap into the world of business. Business Professionals never ask, and most of the time don't care, about why things work the way they do or what they can do. Business Professionals care about what these things can do for them. Business people don't care how the software works, but they do care about how the software can make their job easier, make them and their customers or clients more profitable, and most importantly save time and money.
I'll use the easiest analogy I can think of: the computer. Arguably the most important technological turning point for the future of our society. Computers make jobs easier, faster, safer, on and on and on. Indeed, the future of every industry, profession, and trade lies in computers.
Engineers look at computers and think of what they can do with them.
Business Professionals look at computers and think of what they can do for them.
This is a major problem most companies face, especially technological startup companies. Most of these companies are founded and brought into existence by Engineers. These Engineers pour their heart and soul into their product, and in fact it almost becomes a part of them. They know it inside and out, and I'm sure some Engineers could reproduce lines of code or draw plans for a prototype faster than they could give you directions around town or tell you the name of their family pet. So it comes as no surprise that when these people talk about their product, they want to tell you everything. Everything it can do, they way it does what it does, and what they should do to make their product better. And there's nothing wrong with that. Engineers are educated, trained, and programmed to think that way; in fact it's that way of thinking that drives the innovation and creativity behind the products we use everyday.
Enter the business world. Business Professionals want to use these products. They want to make their jobs easier, safer, and more efficient all while saving time and money. But they don't care about how the product works, only about how the product is going to work for them. This is where Engineers face one of their most difficult tasks: taking a step back from their creation and looking at it from a completely different point of view.
Back to the computer analogy. When Bill Gates was introducing Windows to the world Business Professionals weren't concerned about what it was going to do. They were concerned about what it was going to do for them. Windows would not have been successful if Microsoft constantly showed people what it could do and how it did what it did. They were successful because they showed people how computers could turn an entire day's worth of work into something that could be done in ten minutes or, even better, something that could be done automatically with no human interaction at all.
So in the end, if you're an Engineer and anytime you're asked a question you spew out a technical manual, well then the education/training/programming worked. But if instead you come back with "So tell me about…" and tailor a response based on the other party's needs, well then you just may be on the way to bridging the gap between Engineering and Business.
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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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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.
