Include multiple templates in Office (DOCX/XLSX) output
We would like the ability to include multiple reports in a single Word or Excel document without having to have everything in a single template. For example, many of our users have a cover page, cover letter, quote summary, quote details and other reports that they may or may not include in a proposal. This is fine in PDF, but only one report at a time may be selected in Word/Excel format. For various reasons, we encourage users to choose PDF output, but sometimes they need access to the other formats and currently have to generate one document at a time.
We understand there are limitations because things may vary between templates, including margins, headers/footers, style definitions, etc., but it is still on our wishlist if it can be accomplished at some point in the future.
Hi Brent,
Thank you for clarifying. I will close this ticket as declined per your comment before. Thank you for the suggestion, and please submit any other ideas you have to improve our products.
Adam Austin
Product Manager
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Brent R. commented
After further discussion with our developers who do the integration into our system, I now understand this is a limitation on our side rather than something Windward can directly address. In a nutshell, we present reports based on discrete templates from which the user can pick and choose, but we have further restrictions on report availability that couldn't be adequately addressed by including them all as subreports (e.g. a report that shows product costs and not just selling prices shouldn't be available to all users). On our end, when PDF output is selected, we temporarily generate the reports individually and then combine them into a single PDF with a third-party package. We don't have similar functionality for Word output and only allow one report to be selected at a time. At the time I submitted this idea, I thought that was a Windward limitation, not understanding precisely how our integration was working behind the scenes. You can probably close this idea, especially since it sounds like the scenario you described would work well for a more straightforward implementation/integration. Thanks!
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Hello Brent!
I am trying to understand your feature request and understand how this differs from our current functionality offered by import tags. One approach I just tried on my machine was to make input parameters that correlate to each of the sub-documents in the output. The user can specify which sub-reports they want in their full report. I wrapped import tags that output sub-templates in an If tag so that the import tag only outputs the pages the user desires. This allows my report to output any combination of cover page, cover letter, report summary, and report details that the user defines. The final output report maintained the headers and footers of the master template that had the import tags, and I imagine this would be the case with other sorts of formatting as well: the master templates styles would be maintained while child report styles might get overwritten.
Does this explanation address your use case? If not, what are the characteristics of your use case that are not addressed by this approach? I want to make sure I fully understand your request as I assess this idea.
Thank you for your submission!
Adam Austin
Product Manager