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Our experts volunteer their time to help other people in the technology industry learn and succeed. Plans and Pricing. Contact Us. The generation of documents can occur directly from within Word, but generally for anything serious they require a server component, which may be on a local or remote machine.
HotDocs is more likely to be used in applications where there is more human interaction in the document assembly. This perhaps makes it a stronger contended for legal merging where there is considerable individuality about the documents but nonetheless based on a precedent document. HotDocs also works with WordPerfect which was my previous favourite document generating platform. Windward is very good for complex documents and can include dynamic charts, and boilerplating of parts of the document.
Both products generate Word documents which are standalone, discrete from the original data they were based on.. The market for document generation is always widening, and a relatively new class of products CCM Customer Communication Management which often are more oriented to the generation of digital content, also can produce Word documents. Products of this type include OpenText, Ecrion, Kofax, and many more. When Microsoft released Word , they entered into a brand new era of using XML as the underlying structure for Word documents in place of the Microsoft proprietary binary file.
DOC format. One of the reason for this was customer demand for long term storage of documents in non-proprietary formats so that content could be readily accessed in the future. Microsoft gave no real tools for creating documents using XML, but did allow you to attach XML tags to documents, the major purpose of this was to allow extraction of data from a document, but also perhaps unintentionally opened the possibility of merging data with documents using XSLT, which meant that Word itself is not needed to create the finally merged document, other than to open, view and print it.
Microsoft Word was never good being used as a server application however XSLT was available both on client side and server side of all the major operating systems. DOCX file. There were two problems with this. If you needed to make even minor edits to the template you really had to go back to the original source document and start the transformation process from scratch.
Often it was necessary to manually edit the XSLT to get the desired results, so having to start from scratch each time could be quite an impost. But the fact that Microsoft had committed to this technology, and had provided some tools was an encouraging thing. I used this quite extensively until an additional problem popped up. The first problem was an annoyance, but the second a killer. In May Microsoft was successfully sued for infringing a patent regarding XML markup by the company i4i and it founder Michel Vulpe.
As part of the settlement in Microsoft released an update as part of the normal Windows and Office updates to remove the XML tagging in Office , and and was precluded from using the technology in Office Although XML is open, specific implementation of it can be subject to copyright. Once an XSLT template had been created using the Word XSLT Inference tool though, it was still possible to generate a new document based on it, because Word was not again involved until after the document was generated, and that document was no longer dependant on the template or the data source.
As soon as the document was opened in Word, the markup itself was removed with a helpful message from Microsoft, but that was already too late, the document had been populated with the data and the XSLT did its job. But it meant that these template could no longer be created, nor old ones edited. Word like the other Office programs, are not suitable for running as server processes. In Word , Microsoft introduced Content Controls. Content Controls are a little like Word Fields.
Microsoft changed the layout of the Word DOCX file, so that rather than being directly an XML file it is a package of components, packaged and compressed together. To look at the file structure of a Word document the easiest way is to rename the document extension to. With the later version graphic files are saved in the package file and referenced by the content XML.
Similarly you can add an XML document to the package, and you can then bind this to Content Controls. In Word Microsoft did some tweaking to the Content Controls and now they are far more useful for document generation. Sales Order Navigator. Project ID Lookup.
Currency Online Update. PowerPoint Integration. Skype Integration. Matlab Integration. Excel Printer. XML Word Printer. Project Time Management. Prerequisites Microsoft Word Background XML is a standard technology for data exchange between various platforms and applications.
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