It is not uncommon to find someone using the terms “document automation” and “document generation” interchangeably. This is probably because they are similar processes and one process helps you perform the other. But this does not mean that they are the same. It would make it clear if we looked at what is involved in each process.
Document automation is the process of setting up rules that will guide the generation of documents. Automated documents are able to work like robots, where they are intelligently drafted based on the rules that have been set.
To set up rules, you would need to design templates. This designing of templates is part of the automation process. Templates act as systems that will guide the workflow in creating a final document.
Word document automation software has made it easy for people without programming skills to automate their documents by simply creating the template by answering specific questions and then the software will use the data provided to create the template.
The advantages of document generation are made possible by the automation process. After you have designed a template, a document can then be created using the guidelines set in the template. This means instead of a secretary in a law firm typing out an entire legal document, say an agreement for the sale of property, they would be able to click on that document and simply fill in variables like the names of the parties involved and their addresses, but all the other legal information needed for the agreement will be generated automatically. Here's an in-depth guide on document generation.
Another term you may come across in association to document generation, is “document assembly.” This is part of the process of generating a document and sometimes people may use the words interchangeably.
Document assembly, however, is about pulling the different templates and data associated with a particular document you may be attempting to generate. For example, a bank may be sending an email to a client but may also want to send them an attachment of their financial statement, this would mean a template for an email will be needed and the financial statement as well. Document assembly will come in to play as the system collects all the necessary data as well as the documents needed and then puts them together to generate the final email.
In a nutshell, document automation is the initial stage of automating the process of easy document generation, it involves setting up guidelines and rules to be followed when generating a document and this is achieved with the use of templates. Steps for document generation, on the other hand, takes place after the automation process and it involves following the set guidelines in a template to create documents automatically. You will also realize that document automation maybe a longer process in comparison to document generation since designing templates can be complicated depending on the software that you are using. Although the template process has been improved, it still takes some time to get it right.
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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.
