For anyone who has had to create major documents like legal agreements, proposals, and annual financial reports, there is no doubt that these are painstaking activities that take up a lot of time. Wouldn’t you be happy if there was a way you could do it faster and easier? Automation presents that solution along with other advantages, and yet many organizations still do not employ it in their document generation process. Why?
Often the reason something gets rejected is because of misconceptions. In this case, some myths abound that discourage people from automating. Let us take a look at some of those myths.
In fact, it is quite the opposite! Document automation software can create even the most complex proposals and other documents in a matter of minutes. All you need to do initially is to just connect it to just one or even multiple data sources and design the template in your favorite programs like MS Office and take advantage of conditional logic to customize the documents for future use. You can automate the whole process and create hundreds of documents with just a single template.
In a nutshell, creating complex documents becomes child’s play!
Many people worry that if computers begin doing the jobs of humans, then human employees will be of no use; however, this is just a myth. Many companies have automated to the advantage of both the company and its employees. The automation process is about efficiency—you may use a computer to type instead of a pen an paper to write. Typing is just writing but faster and clearer. Automation brings about efficiency and frees up time to focus on important work instead of repetitive processes.
Automation compliments and speeds up your employees’ efforts and does not replace them!
No doubt, since you are going paperless, you need a device to be able to access the documents, but that is just as far as we go in agreeing to the statement because in whole that is simply a myth. The devices needed are not special. A laptop, desktop, mobile phone, and tablet can all be used to access documents as long as they have network access. Document automation actually makes it easier to access documents wherever you are, without having to be in the building where the document is stored.
Automated documents are designed for use within the organization, therefore, anyone who is authorized to handle particular documents would have access to the documents. For example, anyone in the legal department would have access to contract documents while the sales team would have access to sales proposals. True though, there are some restrictions that can be set so that sensitive documents do not end up in the wrong hands or being misused. That is only being cautious just like you would lock up sensitive documents in a filing cabinet.
Document generation software is designed just like any office program like Word, Excel, and Outlook, so it just takes a few minutes to get used to it. It is intended to be user-friendly, therefore complications are avoided. You may need to get used to a few features of the software, but it certainly does not need prior knowledge of programming. The software integrates into the already existing programs on an ordinary computer so if you are used to Microsoft software, you would still be able to use the same programs with minimal adjustments needed. So, you save a lot of time and resources creating documents in an already familiar environment.
Small or big businesses using manual processes are already spending a lot of money and time generating documents manually. A lot of human resources are tied up in repetitive processes that take up a long time to complete. Automation software is an investment in empowering efficiency that in the long run saves time and money.
Think of how much money could be lost if a legal document has a few human errors that cost you a business deal, yet with document automation, you are sure there will be no errors and you can deliver the final document faster than you would if you had to generate it manually.
The developers of document automation tools already thought about this and they have affected digital signatures. These are recognized just as well as handwritten signatures and the idea is to ensure that they are restricted to only authorized individuals. Electronic signatures are being used widely in different industries, but people do not notice that they are actually using electronic signatures. They remain just as safe as the other signatures and ease the process of having documents approved.
It is important that such myths are busted so that organizations can see document automation for what it really is. There is a lot of unfounded information that is spread about automation and that is keeping organizations away from technology that will actually improve the efficiency of the business and ensure that less time is spent on something that may be important but can actually be done automatically and faster and like every business would like to hear, it actually saves time and money and helps you make more out of a small investment.
Read more about how Windward handles document automation 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).
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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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.
