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Modular Document Creation? Notes Publishing?
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Posted by 22111
Nov 9, 2020 at 05:38 PM
I hadn’t been aware pics also should be included, don’t know how that could done with Excel - my Excel and Jot+ hints were independent from each other (also, Jot+ does work with ANSI, so no Russian, Arabian, Chinese, etc. chars). I think that some suggestions here leave out an aspect which would be important for me (hence my Excel, Jot+ or even a clipboard manager suggestions, again: didn’t of pics though): the FAST gathering of the elements to be combined for every individual proposal, i.e. “simili-bulk processing readiness”.
Some clipboard manager may be able to work even with a mixture of text and pics, so would probably also be UltraRecall or some other more elaborate outliner (IQ probably, mentioned above); it would be important that the tool allows for multiple selection of non-contiguous items, and then for grouped export of that compound (which Jot+ would do, didn’t try its competitors for this task).
My extensive Excel suggestion was borne out of the same idea to get each proposal / whatever such combining task FAST, since I suppose (without knowing the situation) that there will be a group of more-or-less standard proposals, to be then “fine-tuned” somewhat, and the “outliner” suggestions (incl. Jot+) all start from a slightly other situation: That there would only be ONE “base” proposal which then would be fine-tuned for each proposal, or to say it the other way round: First choosing the relevant base proposal, out of several, then fine-tuning that, would be much less work (i.e. “clicking it all together”), and be much less error-prone, too, than having to do heavy clicking, each time, within just ONE tree (i.e. one base containing ALL elements, incl. the irrelevant ones for a certain base situation), in an outliner. There, you would then need several sub-trees, partly with clones, then “click together” the elements in the different subtrees.
Since cloning would be very helpful then, in order to avoid de-sync later on (of identical elements copied to several subtrees), UR/IQ would be preferable indeed then - UR at least does NOT allow to also see the begin of the text/content of every element at the same time together with the respective item titles, all at once, in order to better check if the selection is ok in its whole, whilst in Excel (or an Excel clone), that is possible indeed (explained above), so if you can resolve the pic problem (which should be solvable in Excel though), all you need are two macros, and then some tool to print out / export from file or from clipboard (i.e. the Excel output), and for “clicking together” and for “checking if ok”, your Excel table (as explained above) should be the most neat solution.
And, in real life, the complete output of this would NOT be then printed / used “as is”, but be inserted into a Word or other document, with the addressee’s name/address and all, so clipboard output would be the actual choice here, the target document creation possibly half-automated (prospect’s data would come from a db).
Of course, and even before the “clicking together” of the elements, it should be assured that the right prospect gets the right proposal. Thus, you would have that data, to be included into the target document, and also and especially the prospect data from which you infer WHAT proposal they will get, in a second window on your screen, while, in Excel (or wherever), you compose the “body” of the proposal, from the relevant elements. Which will then be 3 tools in all - since in the Word (or other) target element, the “other prospect data” will not be included -, albeit that target tool being able to work in the background, i.e. no visual checking should be necessary there anymore, once it’s all set up: On-screen, two windows would thus be sufficient: prospect data source and proposal elements “list”.
Your students will probably have got Excel anyway, in their majority (since it’s the most widely available “all”-in-one solution for students et al.), and if you have them do the necessary macros, I’d be interested in those. Since the Excel solution for your task would also be the solution of choice for many other use cases implying “clicking together” elements for common output; up to 12 or 15 different “base cases” (here: base proposals), it should be quite neat indeed, again: because it’s fast AND gives a complete overview (title PLUS start of text/content of each paragraph or similar) of the result, WITHOUT having to check the full-text output, and that, as said, seems to be an important criterion to me.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Nov 12, 2020 at 03:10 PM
Amontillado wrote:
>I use a Mac. If I right-click on an entry in the Library I get a context
>menu that includes “Copy >”.
>
>Hover on Copy and I get another menu with different forms of copy,
>including copy library path.
Strange, there is no Copy command in the context menu neither in NotebooksApp 1.4 nor in the current 2.2 version on my Macbook.
But there is a command called “PDF erstellen” (Create PDF) that combines the notes I selected before and writes them into one PDF file. In the Windows version, there is no such command :-(
Posted by 22111
Nov 16, 2020 at 11:15 PM
In Excel, it should also be possible to export from 2 adjacent columns, which would be of interest in order to better intercalate “personalized” text bits into the “standard” ones.
column 1 = title, column 2 = text begin of the snippet from column 5, 6, 7…, column 3 = free for additional texts right after the snippet in column 2 of the same row.
This way, those “additions” would be VISIBLE (with their first words at least) when creating the “thing” (commercial offering or whatever), which would not be the case if you added them (which would be technically possible of course) after the respective text in column 2.
From a technical POV, it should be possible to just “activate” the cell in column 2, and then, whenever in column 2 the cell is activated AND there is text in the same row in column 3, too, that text would be inserted, in export, right after the column 2 text, and then “back to column 2”, etc.
Generally speaking, it’s a little unfortunate that in Excel, you only (?) can switch between “no wordwrap” which means “just 1 line of text being visible in the cell” and “wordwrap” which means ALL lines of text being visible in the cell”, and which is certainly not wanted since it would ask for tremendous vertical scrolling; an ideal solution would be “cell height: 2 lines”, so that more of the (often much longer) text is visible, but without too much scrolling.
Independently of this observation, it’s always recommended to visually distinguish standard (column 2) and personalized text bits (by putting them into column 3), AND to also insert the latter in-between the former, and not only before and after the standardized text body, for obvious customer relationship reasons, and even when that’s not strictly necessary from a purely technical POV.