Hi Greg.

>I tried out FRX2Word and was pretty impressed with how well it renders a report in Word. One questions I have: I notice that the word doc uses boxes to contain the text. This looks very good, but makes it more difficult to edit the next afterwarrds. Does your next version address this issue?

A Shape object, in this case a Textbox, is the only real way to handle exact placement of objects point-by-point in Word. Also, the formatting and font can be changed item by item in an FRX and this requires isolating individual text items that may exist in the same line but be radically different in appearence.

I have no plans to change this usage in the next version. What I am primarily trying to improve for the next version is speed and "stretch" fields. I had the stretch problem resolved but the calculations using Word automation slowed everything down to the point that it wasn't worth it so I removed the functionality.

Ideally, what I would like to do (no promises, folks) is to have some sort of precompile where a template document is created. This Word document would contain the styles and whatnot required by the report at runtime. If this template is included in the FRX directory then FRX2Word would pick up on it and speed should increase dramatically.

>A requirement that I have from a client is that a report is easily modified by the user in word after it is created. These reports are basic simple reports with one font and a couple of font sizes/styles. One thought I had on this is that I could generate the report to an ASCII file, and include some basic formatting tags. Sort of quazi html tags. Then have some automation code open up the text file and then feed it into a word document, using the tags to set fontsize/style. Thus one would end up with a pure text file the same as if you had sat and typed it in by hand. This file could also then be saved as html if one wanted to do that.
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>I am just wondering if you had ever gone done this road and have any advice on the matter.

I have gone down this road (and, I don't mean to speak for him, but I think Jim Booth has too), recently finishing a contract management application. The only way this worked was to allow the user to individually edit contract clauses and then put it all together to print. The clauses are stored in General fields and I use in-place editing through an OLE Bound control for editing. DOC files are never saved because of security issues and the possibility that the DOC could be edited without the changes coming through to the database.