Microsoft Word Scope of Work Compatibility with Images
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Fred Ceron
Once you have selected the location of the image, click on Open. The image will then be added to your Microsoft Word document. For more: https://grerem.com/
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Kevin Frye
Here is a custom report that supports .docx format. This is a copy of the standard Scope of Work report. The report looks for a file in your project folder named SOW.docx. If it finds the file, it will launch Word in the background, open the file, select the contents, copy them to the clipboard and paste into a RichTextBox in the report (as rich text). Because this is still rich text it cannot provide 100% support for elements of the .docx format. I did some testing and it appears that not saving the file as RTF in Word may cause less issues. I think it is worth testing to see if it improves your results. Please let me know if it works for you.
Mitsu Orozco Eric Kalpakoff Cody Frisch Simon Fulstow
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BarrySato
Kevin Frye: Any tips for translating your .docx reference Detail to our own custom proposal report that has an integrated SOW? This would allow our proposals to maintain page number sequencing and formatting. If so, thank you in advance
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Andrew Moore
I'm going to double down on this requirement - I spend too much time reformatting WordPad to allow for images to not be overlapped and fit into the document. If anyone has any solutions, without adding 30+ carriage returns, assistance is much appreciated.
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Eric Kalpakoff
I've had mixed results with Wordpad RTFs. Mostly bullet points being 'odd' and images, although inserted, don't always show up in the place you put them when you render the report, table or no. Bullets will sometimes be different sizes in the list which looks like a bad copy paste job. We will often write the SOW in Word for spellcheck purposes and copy/paste it into wordpad. But, like Kevin said, Microsoft isn't always good on that. I'm certain no one at Microsoft uses their own software, otherwise it would work better.
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Mitsu Orozco
This is a MUST need!! Our organization uses Office 360 and having to use Notepad for such an important aspect of SI keeps the program feeling like its from 2001. It's 2020, it's sad we are still forced to use .rtf
Please do right by your loyal customers and add this compatibility.
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Kevin Frye
Mitsu Orozco: The limitation is with the reporting engine we use. While it is has some quite impressive capabilities, doc/docx/pdf support are not included.
Further, you are not limited to using Wordpad (not Notepad). In Project Settings -> General -> Scope of Work, set the "Open Scope of Work RTF file in WordPad" setting to "No". I will use your default editor, hopefully Word. There are three primary limitations to consider.
1) Only TrueType fonts are supported (do not use Open Type)
2) Tables can be problematic. Some tables work fine but others do not. Complex tables with complex borders and images are usually the culprits.
3) Microsoft being Microsoft does not strictly adhere to the RTF file specifications. If you create an RTF using WordPad save a copy, open in Word and Save, then open both files in text editors, you will fond the Word saved file is completely different. Just by saving the document, Word injects a shocking amount of data unnecessary to render the RTF. In my experience, this is largely the culprit when running into issues with Word generated RTf files. They make their own rules. So if you do have trouble with an RTF saved in Word, try opening a COPY in WordPad and saving it. See if that version works better.
I welcome all the constructive comments I can get from every poster here. This is a topic near and dear to me and the work I do. We want to build the best solutions possible. Share your ideas and help us do just that.
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Cody Frisch
Kevin Frye: what about html?
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Kevin Frye
Cody Frisch: Is your comment about saving a Word doc as .html? Because believe it or not, HTML is supported in the RTF controls of our reports. It comes in handy when you want to dynamically build multiple lines of text in the same control that have unique style. Often I write code that grabs an RTF file from the project folder and populates the myRtb.RTF property but you can also use myRtb.HTML. These tags are supported: https://help.grapecity.com/activereports/webhelp/AR13/webframe.html#FormattedText.html
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Cody Frisch
Kevin Frye: Thats what I was thinking as an option for greater formatting. But also I'm thinking the other direction too - if there was a markdown preprocessor in line for the plain text SOW, we could use markdown to format text that then converts to html or rtf (processors exist that do this today.).
I'm a big fan of markdown because its super easy to format text with just some text codes like
bold
. It allows it to be viewed as plain text and still readable but then also be rendered really pretty when needed.But thats the geek in me hating anything that isnt plain text, or formatting driven by a style sheet.
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Kevin Frye
Cody Frisch: Agreed. Have you used WordPress recently? That platform has evolved into a powerful CMS and has impressive capabilities for post formatting. It works for novices and offers plenty of power for geeks. I would love to see something closer to that functionality.
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Cody Frisch
Kevin Frye: Exactly the sort of thing I am thinking.
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Josh Nuske
Kevin Frye: the reporting engine is a third party app, how about exploring a web based service? That way template’s could more easily be created and SOWs could open in a web-based editor. May be able to leverage D-tools cloud infrastructure to make this happen.
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Eric Kalpakoff
Kevin Frye: I feel like, based on your first sentence here, that the reporting engine needs to change. Or there needs to be a separate SOW editing method that inserts a properly formatted RTF (or whatever format) from another program into the Crystal Reports engine unadulterated. @Mitsu is right (from sept 2020) this one aspect of D-Tools prevents integrators from taking their proposals to another level. I feel like the whole of us isn't asking for complex document formatting, but dropping an image in the SOW or a table are basics, essential basics.
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Kevin Frye
Eric Kalpakoff: Tables and images are largely supported in the RTF format. If you use Word as your editor, it typically works well. Do you have examples of not being able to get an RTF to work the way you like?
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Eric Kalpakoff
Kevin Frye: I'll have to collect a few as we stopped trying a long while ago. We were wasting a TON of time trying to get WYSIWYG to actually work. What would happen is images wouldn't remain where they were placed and often the text would just run right over the image. Even in the simplest examples where you had a text block paragraph (no table), then a return, then the image (center justified), then a return, then the next paragraph. The image would be either on top of or below the text. I'll run up some examples.
Simon Fulstow
Agreed! You can add images into the scope of work if you use RTF files - just makes the files huge as the way RTF saves images is terribly inefficient.
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Mitsu Orozco
Simon Fulstow: Thanks Simon. I appreciate the tip, I didn't know you could do that. I will give it a try.
I believe D-tools can still do better by adding .doc and .pdf compatibility. I hope more people comment and upvote enough to make this feature on their roadmap!!
Cheers Simon!
Simon Fulstow
Mitsu Orozco: no problem, and I completely agree. Don't even get me started on page breaks not being supported...!
David Riberi
Simon Fulstow: Graphical elements often get messed up when printing a report, though.
Simon Fulstow
David Riberi: absolutely, we’ve created a number of RTF template files with images sized and placed (after much trial and error) to generally get a really good looking report but it’s painful having to essentially run the report to see what it looks like, then edit the RTF file, run the report again to see if it looks ok, run the report again...... and so on and so on.....
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Kevin Frye
David Riberi: I write custom reports for a living and while issues with graphics do happen, I find it is rare. But there certainly are limitations.