Any tips, suggestions, or 3rd party templates out there that can help design documents with nice formatting, tabbing, tables and images? The requirement is, to print it the way you see it and replace some values (let’s say [FULLNAME] ) with values from the database.
I’ve gone several ways. Simple find/replace in PDFs with Klarisoft’s QuickPDF wrapper and also by using COM + MS Word.
In Word, I simply used the built-in find/replace stuff in the com object and let the user do their own formatting. I used Jim Kane’s com classes from Clarionmag. It was still a lot of work.
Maybe this will help to find Jim’s stuff: https://clarionmag.jira.com/wiki/search?text=stdcom
I have done this with Excel to create PDF forms. Access to a couple of basic Excel functions that would be helpful for including lists is missing but there are some workarounds. (HINT - to Bruce)
We use Office Inside from Capesoft. We first create the document in word as our template with tokens for where we need to do a find and replace. In our system the user just selects from a browse what template they wish to use and then the merge occurs and the doc opens up in word.
Andy Wilton at Noyantis did once show similar with using Google word. Not sure if he has released it yet but that may also be worth a look.