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Request: What tasks do you do with Office suites?

Tue 14 Aug 2007, 08:59 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
I am working on a free series of How To articles about using the productivity editors with Notes 8.  I could really use examples of how you use Office products, particularly word processors, spreadsheets and presentation editors.  For example, mail merge seems to be a very popular topic, so I have included that.  Another seems to be pivot tables for simple on the fly reports, so I have included that.  But what else?  What do you automate, what do you do manually that you wish you could automate, and what do you do manually that you want to do manually with the productivity editors as easily (or more) than you do with Microsoft Office?

Aside from that, does anybody have any suggested or requested topics for the How To articles?  I know there is a lot of interest in the productivity editors, but I don't know what level of information people want right now, whether feature comparisons or programmatic examples or whatever.  

<disclaimer>Since I am also in the middle of working on OpenSesame, any ideas given here may also be fodder for features or demos that I will use in that product.</disclaimer>

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What has been said:


615.1. Darren
(16/08/2007 23:11)

We use Word extensively for formatting our reports that we send to clients. While we could no doubt use a 3rd party product like Intelliprint, everyone already had Office and with VBA being so close to Lotusscript it seemed the path of least resistance at the time.

What we do is send all the Notes document fields across to Word form fields and then automatically run a macro contained in the MS Word template to provide the extra formatting - such as setting the multi-line headers and footers, formatting tables - including adjusting the cell colours etc.

We're very interested in moving this functionality across to the Productivity Editors given that we're currently looking at the licensing costs of Office.