Let users Design their own reports in MS Word.

At last! There's a way for developers to rid themselves of the daunting and time consuming task of trying to design report templates that satisfy business owners and managers. That’s because Windward Reports enables them to design their own reports using popular, Easy to Use word processing programs like Microsoft Word – so there is no new software to learn.

Windward Reports utilizes Microsoft Word, the word processing software program that virtually everyone knows (and frankly, it works with just about every other word processing program, as well.) All a report designer needs to do is open up Word and create the design that they want. So designing a report is now as easy as creating any MS Word document. Your data just flows in and completes the picture, creating reports that will dazzle and impress. It's really that easy.

Designing Reports

Using Windward Reports, you design your own reports in Microsoft Word, a program you know well. No more waiting for development resources. No more back-and-forth endless iterations. Just design and run the perfect report on-the-fly, whenever you need it.

Get started with Windward Reports All your development team has to do is incorporate Windward Reports in to the company system. That’s it. The rest is up to you:

1. Custom design your own report in Microsoft Word (or any word processing program).
2. Place data where you want it. If you know how to input tags yourself, you can do it that way. Or, use our Word add-in AutoTag, which drops the right tags wherever you need them. AutoTag shows you the data it will use for any sample dataset you point to. Place tags anywhere in the document. Tags can loop through sets of data, import images or other templates, or even perform simple calculations such as a total of line items.
3. Finished! When your design is complete, simply upload the template to the location set up by your development team. Your report is ready to run – exactly as you designed it. Just select the output format you want: PDF, RTF, HTML, WordML, SpreadsheetML, XLS or TXT.

With you in control of the report design process, reports take hours, not days to create.

Incorporating Windward Reports

Even though you’ll need to take a little time to set things up right, it’s easy to get started with Windward Reports. Here’s how:

• Create an instance of a report object (in java or .NET), passing it the report template (an rtf or WordML file) as a stream.
• Call the object once for each datasource. You can mix xml, sql, and your own custom datasources. Xml datasources are passed as a stream. Sql is passed as a set of connection parameters or a Connection object.
• Call the object to format the final report and return a stream that is the final report. This final report can be in PDF, RTF, HTML, WordML, SpreadsheetML, XLS, or text.

For direct calls, the above steps are all calls directly into the Windward Reports.jar(java) or WindwardReports.dll(.NET) file. There is no server to be run.

For client/server calls, a server component must be running and the client calls to the server. Messages are passed between client and server over TCP/IP. The server API is public so the Windward Reports server can be called from programs written in any language.

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Create virtually any type of report in Word.	Merge the created template with your data to create the final report.	Produce the final report in popular formats like pdf, rtf, xls, etc.