Is Scribe Appropriate For...

[jasongodoy]

I've just found out about the Scribe plug-in and am wondering if the plug-in is appropriate for creating better looking Excel reports (similar to what custom reports can look like when saving PDFs out of FileMaker) than the basic Excel output Filemaker generates with just columns of data with no formatting or positioning control over data?

Some of my customers have requested our reports in Excel format instead of PDF. Is Scribe the answer for this or should I look elsewhere? FYI, the reports are not always the same (columns can be selected and deselected at will), so I would literally need to write data to every cell to mimic what our report looks like as a PDF.

It's important to note that I'm not trying to match exactly what our reports look like in PDF, just make the Excel documents look better than what FM give us by default.

Thanks in advance.

JG

[Smef]

Scribe will allow you to maintain formatting of your excel document, so you would make a template file for each kind of report you wanted to make, with your formatting already in place (ex: making a certain column bold or red).

You are correct that you would need to specify the contents of each cell. The easiest way to do this would be to write a looping script in filemaker that would write the necessary number of cells.

[rivet]

What about using it with Word to create quotes. FMP has such a tough time getting data over page breaks.

1. Is this a good to use Scribe to move a quote built with line items over to word.

2. What does it do with filemaker tabs (opt+tab) will it convert them.

3. if previewed in word, can changes in word be saved. or is word just a preview tool.

thanks

[Smef]

Word documents probably aren't the best way to deliver quotes, since it's easy to accidentally (or purposefully) edit them after they have been delivered to your clients, but assuming that's what you wanted to do, here are your answers:

1. You could use Scribe to do this, but you can't pass returns to Word docs at this time, so you would need to make your lines ahead of time, which might be inconvenient if you don't know the number of lines you will want to have.

2. Yes, Scribe can handle tabs as of version 1.2

3. Scribe does not interact with Word at all. If you open a document with Word you can edit it as normal, but that would be before or after Scribe has already interacted with the document and saved it out to a container or to your computer.