We’re taking OfficeWriter to the cloud. In these videos you’ll see how OfficeWriter runs on Windows Azure. Taking our exisiting OfficeWriter web sample projects, Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights made them run on the Windows Azure cloud platform.
In these videos you will:
Because we had such a great response from the first webinar, we’re opening more seats and hosting this PivotTable webinar again.
Take a first look at the new PivotTable API within OfficeWriter 8.4 in this interactive webinar.
Our Senior Sales Engineer (and adept demo master), Chad Evans, will walk you through several ways PivotTables can help you wrangle and report on your data. Bring your questions or email them beforehand and we’ll be happy to include them.
When:
Friday, March 1, 2013 at 1 p.m. EST
What we’ll cover:
Spots are limited. Save your seat and register today.
Can’t attend, but still want to learn more? Register anyway! We’ll send the slides and a recording of the webinar after the event.
Have you heard? OfficeWriter 8.4 with PivotTable support is here! You’re invited to take a first look at the new PivotTable API within OfficeWriter 8.4 in this interactive webinar.
Our Senior Sales Engineer (and adept demo master), Chad Evans, will walk you through several ways PivotTables can help you wrangle and report on your data. Bring your questions or email them beforehand and we’ll be happy to include them.
When:
Friday, February 22, 2013 at 1 p.m. EST
What we’ll cover:
Spots are limited. Save your seat and register today.
Can’t attend, but still want to learn more? Register anyway! We’ll send the slides and a recording of the webinar after the event.
WATERTOWN, MA (February 12, 2013) – SoftArtisans announced the addition of PivotTables to their OfficeWriter product today. OfficeWriter 8.4 is now available for download. Included in this new version, is the ability to create, modify, and remove PivotTables within users’ Excel workbooks. With the new PivotTable functionality customers have the ability to add Report Filters to better filter and sort their data, as well as change the data source of a PivotTable (including PivotTables already copied with CopySheet). This provides users with more fine-grained control over their data and reports.
Also included in this product release are new features to their WordTemplate model. Within WordTemplate DOCX files, users now have the option to programmatically set the document properties of their DOCX files and to remove bookmarked content when delivering reports.
OfficeWriter provides customers Continue reading PivotTables Now Available within OfficeWriter 8.4
Take a walk through of the new PivotTable functionality in the release of OfficeWriter 8.4. To access the new API, download an OfficeWriter Evaluation.
To view a complete list of features and fixes in this release, see What’s New in OfficeWriter 8.4.
OfficeWriter 8.4 packs a powerful punch with exciting new features, most notable of which is ExcelApplication support for PivotTables in OOXML (XLSX, XLSM) files. ExcelWriter already supports the use of PivotTables in ExcelTemplate and SSRS reports, but now you can programmatically create, manipulate, and remove PivotTables with ExcelApplication.
The new PivotTable API gives you the freedom to:
With the API you also have the ability to change the data source of a PivotTable. Continue reading What’s new in OfficeWriter 8.4
One of the questions that comes up frequently when talking with customers is how can they get their images into their Word document with OfficeWriter? Depending on how you are using OfficeWriter and making your Word documents, there are a few ways to do this. The following outline several of these methods and cases in which to use them.
This is the easiest way to get images into your document. Since OfficeWriter can use the Word file you have already created and allow you to enhance it with data from a database, you can get all of the design functionality of Word with the enhanced capabilities of OfficeWriter. This method is commonly used when designing a document that uses your company logo, for example.
Another option is to design your document in Word, but leave a place holder for a dynamically loaded image. (A quick overview on how to do this can be found here.) This method is great when the document is structured the same each time it is run and you want to keep your company logo static, but use different department logos.
You can use one of two methods to directly insert images into a Word template from an image column: the placeholder method or the the image modifier method. For example, in MS SQL Server, there is a column type “varbinary” used just for that purpose. This method is perfect for creating an employee directory containing the employee’s picture along with their contact information, or for a product catalog, showing the product alongside the product details. (For further details on how to to design your report with images stored in a database, please see our documentation on inserting an image.)
This is the more complicated case of the bunch. Unlike the previous instances where you were obtaining your images directly from a database, this process involves accessing your images stored in another location, such as a network share. Continue reading Enhancing your Word Document with Images Using OfficeWriter
In case you haven’t noticed just yet, along with playing around in .NET and working with Microsoft Office reports, we enjoy food here. This year we’re incorporating both of these passions into a new company-wide challenge to ring in the new year. And this time it involves cookies! Both the kind on your computer and the edible ones that are ever so plentiful this time of year.
The Challenge: Break out and dust off your to-die-for cookie recipes with those secret ingredients handed down from Meemaw to her kids to you, the kind you pull out at parties to impress your friends, the kind people will be talking about at company holiday parties for years to come. Represent your cookie, secret recipe, or baking process using technology (bonus points and automatic win for incorporating technologies that power OfficeWriter.) Example: Create a report in Excel outlining your recipe, code your recipe in Chef (see what we did there), tweet out a line of your recipe every hour on the hour, etc. You can play along at home as well. Post a link to your project in the comments section below and perhaps there will be a little swag in it for you.
The gauntlet has been thrown. Who will win?
Participants:
Alison: Product Owner. Pivot Table extraordinaire.
Kate: Technical Services. SharePoint guru.
Nick: IT. Breaks things. Fixes things. And repeat. Continue reading Cookie Wars: What do OfficeWriter, Baked Goods, & Technology Have in Common?
Curious to know more about how OfficeWriter fits in with the Microsoft Application Platform? We’ve partnered with Andrew Brust from Blue Badge Insights to bring you an overview of the additive value OfficeWriter provides to the Microsoft stack.
In this powerpoint:
With the holidays just around the corner, schedules are becoming increasingly packed. Maybe you’re on the hunt for the perfect gift, or entertaining the slightly overbearing but well-meaning in-laws, or maybe, just maybe, you need to make those last minute travel plans. With all the hustle and bustle, it’s easy to overlook those seemingly insignificant but entirely necessary holiday cards.
As a developer I’m always looking to save time and automate just about everything…even my holiday cards. (Don’t tell my mother she still thinks I spend hours every year making them.) So in the spirit of the giving season, I wanted to share my sample code with you, to get you on your way to automating your holiday cards and back to searching for the perfect stocking stuffers.
To get started, you will need to have OfficeWriter installed in order to be able to use the sample code below. In my solution, I used OfficeWriter and its built-in WordTemplate functionality to do a server-side mail merge. If you do not have OfficeWriter, you can download a free evaluation here.
Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:
Open the solution and run the generator to see sample holiday cards and mailing labels like:
Looking at the sample code you will see that with just about 10 lines of OfficeWriter code I can generate both holiday cards and mailing labels. Continue reading Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter