When we began development on our tour operator software package, it was clear that the reporting output was going to be the most important aspect of the application. Our potential clients required full itineraries containing descriptions, pictures, tables and other complex requirements, so finding the correct solution was imperative.
With that in mind we immediately began looking at the usual industry standard, Crystal Reports, as we were developing in .Net and it seemed like the logical way to go. After 1 year of development effort we finally had a beta version in use at various clients only to find that Word output from Crystal Reports is absolutely un-useable from a user perspective. The reason being is that text and pictures are placed in Textbox objects and are placed absolutely. Meaning you cannot simply cut a portion of the document out and reformat with ease, as each box must be repositioned manually.
We needed to find a solution to our problem, and that’s when we stumbled across Aspose.Words that seemed to offer a valid solution to the above mess.
For starters it’s 100% native .Net code (also available in Java). Aspose.Words can take a standard Word document as the starting template for a report, then using bookmarks, mail merge fields etc. you can populate the report easily and flexibly using their component.
As the component inserts Word objects directly into the document it does not have the limitation of having to place text using TextBox objects. Their latest version supports Office 2007 formats and some of their other components also offer you the ability to export to PDF!
There are other similar products out on the market, but I’d recommend checking out Aspose.Words if you are looking into creating Word docs from your .Net or Java application.
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