Is there any business that can run without the use of documents? Probably not. At some point a letter has to be written, an invoice issued or a contract signed up. However, documents do not come easy. There are a few pain points to creating those documents needed to run a business.
Here are some of the common challenges faced by office administrators:
For many data entry professionals, copy and paste is actually a lifesaver because it saves them from having to type the same document all over again. However, Ctrl + C and Ctrl+V can get very tiring when you need to do it several hundred times and that also means you need to highlight the section first, then copy.
There is a sure-fire way to do this faster, easier, and with more accuracy. Templates and PODs -- these can help create a document with a single click and you can drag and drop certain sections (eg: header, footer, company contact information, etc.) using PODs onto the template to save time.
Here’s another time-squandering activity that almost everyone has been a victim of. You want to send an invoice to a client, and you have to go through emails exchanged to confirm what discount you had promised to give them in the invoice. Or you are writing a report and you cannot find the sales figures for the week you left someone else in charge.
A document automation system would be the answer to all that. Documents can be populated using the right data from a common data storage system. Windward connects with over 150 datasources and the beauty of it is you can connect your template with them and populate it with information from multiple datasources.
Sometimes editing a document can be as difficult as looking for a particular needle in a pile of needles. You might confirm that everything is fine, but not realize you forgot to change the date, or you did not add the dollar sign to a quote sent to a client in Japan, so it is assumed that the figures are in Yen. So much can go wrong despite your best efforts to ensure it doesn't.
Once again, the use of templates can make the process much easier. Document generation software like Windward can automatically enter the right values into areas like currency, date, and other similar fields based on your business logic conditions.
The final draft of a document may need to be approved and getting this approval can create problems. First of all, you may have to carry your laptop to the reviewer to have a look at the document, or have them hover over you as they read through it. Another alternative is to email it to them but then the back and forth emails may result in several versions of the same document.
A common drive where a draft can be kept makes it easier for the final person to read through, make necessary changes and save them without creating a new version. Approvals can also be automated if you use automation software that has pre-approved templates and Windward makes this all happen in just a few clicks.
If you’ve just discovered us, we’re excited. Try Windward Core (embeds into your existing/new application) or Windward Hub (just sign up and go) for free and take it for a spin. Start automating documents in just a few clicks starting today.
Adds various capabilities such as inequalities,descending sort, joins, and other functions.
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.
SQL Select Debugger
If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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Added a Query tab as a field for typing or pasting in a select statement
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.
All tags using that Data source will be automatically updated with that name.
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.
New single interface to replace 2 separate dialog boxes
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.
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.
Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
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.
Try Windward with our 30-day free trial and start creating documents in quick time with our low/no code solutions.
Includes support for new ForEach and slide break handling, table header row repeat across slide breaks, and native Microsoft support for charts and images.
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.
Tags are color coded in the template by type, making it easy to visually identify them.
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.
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.
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.
Documents can include advanced Word image properties such as shadows, borders, and styles.
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.
Windward has updated HTML output to reflect changing HTML standards.
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.
Windward now works with a slew of new datasources: MongoDB, JSON, Cassandra, OData, Salesforce.com
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.
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.
