About Digerati Solutions
Digerati Solutions creates high-quality websites and tailor-made software solutions. We are a small, tight-knit team. All our sites and applications are custom-built to fit the needs of our clients.
Problem
Digerati required a way to dynamically generate forms and documentation for a system that manages state school sport competitions and registrations. We needed a solution that would make it easy for our client to customize the branding and layout of the forms without low-level technical expertise.
Solution
We decided that the best way to achieve this would be to let our client design the form template using Microsoft Word, and then inject custom data dynamically at runtime. Aspose.Words for .NET was found to be the best tool for the job. It came highly recommended by the .NET community, and the documentation appeared to be quite good.
The first screenshot shows our MS Word template with the mail merge fields such as TeamName, Year, LoginUrl, and a table of Apparel.
The second screenshot shows the output (some fields hidden for privacy). It was easy to inject our data into the mail merge, and what surprised us, even more, was how easy it was to inject repeating data. In this case, a table of apparel.
Experience
Finding a solution
We tried other products but found them difficult to use, buggy, or have gaps in features. Aspose.Words for .NET came highly recommended on stackoverflow.com.
Implementation
We found it very easy to integrate Aspose.Words for .NET with our system; no hiccups – it just worked straight away. The API is mostly self-documenting – a savvy developer could, for the most part, can ‘guess’ class and method names and use the tool without reference to the documentation. For more complex operations, the documentation proved to be very comprehensive, and where it lacked, answers were found on the forums.
Outcome
Aspose.Words for .NET made it easy to solve our problem, and made mail-merge from within a .NET application possible, where other solutions could not.
Next Steps
We will use Aspose.Words for .NET moving forward in applications that require documents to be generated with dynamic content.
Summary
Having used other similar tools in the past, it became clear to us that Apose.Words for .NET is a cut above the rest, both in terms of quality, reliability, and ease of use. We would recommend it to any developer looking for a way to manipulate Word documents.
Andrew Harward
Web Developer
Digerati Solutions
