Many employees in finances and other industries may find that creating a spreadsheet for each of their customers is a very time-consuming task. Is it worth all the effort?
If you create a template for your spreadsheets, you no longer need to begin from zero when you need to input data for your customers. You’ll also need a smart Excel-based template editor like Windward to assist you in this process.
Avoiding human mistakes from copy-and-pasting is not the only thing that makes having a template a good idea. Think of a situation where you need to send several of your customers the same spreadsheet or table, but the data needs to be customized for each unique person. If you had to recreate every single spreadsheet for each of your customers, you may leave out important information or have errors in your data.
With a template, however, the important information will already be there, and you just need to change the variable data like names and data tags. In cases where you need to maintain uniformity, a template will ensure that you always have uniform formatting. This is important for critical business documents that need to stay company-compliant.
Look at spreadsheets like building blocks, you can start with one cell, put another and another on top of it until you have a structure. The difference here though is that you can freely edit spreadsheet blocks as many times as necessary.
Once you get a hang of it, you will enjoy the freedom that Excel spreadsheet templates provide. For example, using the same formatting for several blocks or giving each block its own formatting makes a big difference.
The combination of Excel as a spreadsheet template and Windward (an Excel-based template editor) to generate the documents offers you the ability to deal with large data files. Since Excel supports the creation of templates, it becomes very easy to create different files and then edit them with Windward’s easy-to-use tags. All you have to do is open a new Excel workbook and edit.
Both Excel and Windward include a wide variety of templates already created for different purposes. It’s a good idea to browse these templates and pick one that’s suitable for your needs. You can also build a custom template from scratch that meets your company’s standards.
Dealing with data requires heightened attention to detail to ensure you do not enter the wrong figures, you can minimize the risk of error by using Windward in your Excel-based smart spreadsheets.
Want more control over your data? Try our free, 14-day trial of Windward Designer and edit to your heart’s content.
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).
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If you've just discovered us, we're excited. Learn more about Windward document automation software now.
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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.
