Document Creation Wizards
Many organizations create documents that are key to their business. For example, sales proposals and contracts.
Each document created has a certain amount of common standard content and a certain amount of content that is specific to the client.
Can we build these sophisiticated documents automatically and save ourselves a bunch of time and effort and also guarantee a top quality document?
Yes - with a Word Wizard!
Using Wizard technology complex documents are automatically built from standard text elements under a sophisticated set of rules which are based on user inputted data. A Wizard is a set of dialogs that a user moves through inputting information and making selections, this information is used by the wizard to create a document.
Particular features of wizards are:
- any or all user input can be validated such that the user cannot proceed to the next panel until the correct data has been provided
- user can go back to a previous panel to change a data input
- the panel sequence and content can be varied according to the users inputs, ie the panels displayed depend upon the data being input.
- navigation map to indicate to the user where in the document creation process they are
- sophisticated calculations can be incorporated into the panels
- wizards can be made re-runable whereby all the users inputs are remembered so that an identical document can be created, or the existing document altered, without having to re-enter all the data
CDEV Computing can build Document Generation Wizards to create your documents.
Here is an example of a Sales Proposal Document generating wizard
The user selects File New to create a new document based on the Proposal wizard, the first panel is displayed.
Panel 2 is where the user lists the account team. This can be read from a list of team members to save typing.
The client's business category is selected in Panel 4, together with the main application. This will result in content relevant to this client type and this product be built into the document.
Quantities and prices are specified in Panel 6. Calculations are automatically performed.
The data gathering is complete and the wizard creates the document.
When an existing document that was created using a wizard is opened then the following menu is displayed.
This allows the user to edit the document as one option and as another option the user can run through the wizard panels again. This time the wizard panels will be populated with the data that was originally used to create the proposal.
Key benefits
- increased productivity - fast creation (and recreation) of complex documents
- increased accuracy - user data input is validated