Tag Archives: holiday cards

ASP.NET, Featured, OfficeWriter

Creating Holiday Cards and Other Unexpected OfficeWriter Projects

Last week, our VP of Development Sam and Senior Sales Engineer Chad were challenged to look at different ways to use OfficeWriter. The result? They put together a project designed to keep you in touch with your friends and family this holiday season. They looked at using OfficeWriter’s mail merge feature in a new way. Plus, they took that one step further, looking at how the technologies from this project can be applied to business applications within your company. Before heading home for the holidays, take a little inspiration from this behind-the-scenes video of unexpected ways to use OfficeWriter in building your reports and company documents.

Read the original post, get the code, and take a behind-the-scenes tour of the technologies it runs on.

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Want to get straight to the point? Skip to the end of the video to discover how this project could be applied to your business.

OfficeWriter

Create your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter, The Sequel

seasonsgreetingsThe holiday season is back! Stores are stocking their shelves with the season’s must-haves and calendars are quickly filling up with travel and office parties. With all the hustle, bustle and festivities, occasionally remember to send out those holiday cards and thank-you notes gets lost in the tinsel and taffeta. Well, you’re in luck, because this year we’ve put together a project for you to easily send out holiday thank-you notes and cards the nostalgic, old-fashioned way.

Last year, Sam showed us how to Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter, and this year we’ve added thank-you notes to the mix. So you can spend less time on holiday prep and more time on the things that matter most – friends and family.

Using a few built-in tools with the .NET Framework, OfficeWriter, and templates, you can personalize every card for each one of your friends and family. See the example below. Then make your own by following these steps:

STEP 1 – DOWNLOAD OFFICEWRITER:

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.

STEP 2 – DOWNLOAD SAMPLE CODE:

Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:

  • Sample code
  • Easily modifiable templates for holiday cards, mailing labels, and thank-you letters.
  • Dummy data from a Gmail Contact Export

Open the solution, run the generator, and you can see the three items:

SAMPLE OUTPUT:

SAMPLE CODE:

OfficeWriter makes it easy to generate the finished holiday cards, labels, and thank-you cards. With about 5 lines of OfficeWriter code for each template, within minutes you can go from nothing to a finished, picture-perfect file. The sample code below is a simple way to parameterize the code to handle all of our template files. Continue reading Create your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter, The Sequel →

ASP.NET, OfficeWriter, Programming

Automate Your Holiday Cards with OfficeWriter

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.

Step 1 – Download OfficeWriter:

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.

Step 2 – Download Sample Code:

Next, you will need the sample code. Download the sample solution here. This solution comes bundled with:

  • Sample code
  • Easily modifiable templates for both holiday cards and mailing labels
  • Dummy data

Open the solution and run the generator to see sample holiday cards and mailing labels like:

Holiday Card Generator

Sample Output:

Sample Code:

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 →