What should i use to generate and print letters
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
HTML?
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HTML?
How well would that work if you needed to do a batch run of say 1000 letters? would you have one html page per letter or one html page containing a 1000 letters? am kinda hoping to find a more purpose built solution rather than using a work around.
modified on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 7:44 PM
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How well would that work if you needed to do a batch run of say 1000 letters? would you have one html page per letter or one html page containing a 1000 letters? am kinda hoping to find a more purpose built solution rather than using a work around.
modified on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 7:44 PM
nzdirtyanimal wrote:
- would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
You're not going to print them a 1000 at a time, are you? Assume that you put all those 1000 letters in a single HTML-page, and started printing. Halfway, for some reason, you need to stop. How (and where) are you going to resume printing? I'd suggest you loop your batch-items, generate a single letter, print it, and move on to the next item :)
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
Sounds like a classic case for mail merge - all decent word processors support this.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
You could do this with Word automation and mail merge if you are willing to sit down and code up your own solution. It's not hugely difficult (if you know Word and VB). There are also dedicated products that address this problem. One example is ITP which I have worked with in the past. These are top-end, high-volume tools and they're not cheap, and depending on your requirements, this may be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
First of all, you should get a decent printing setup with a high-volume printer and a dedicated printserver. I then would either go with Office automation - MSOffice and OpenOffice both worked fine for me - or with PDF generation and printing the PDFs - manually or automatically. Or RTF, if the rest of the letters is preprinted. Just be sure what fields you are going to be using, and that they always end up in the same place. Our postal service reserves the right to bill extra for different layouts in bulk mailings.
Cheers, Sebastian -- "If it was two men, the non-driver would have challenged the driver to simply crash through the gates. The macho image thing, you know." - Marc Clifton
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Hi im in the process of building a system that generates printed letters (around 1000 a day) that get sent to our customers and was wondering what are some good tools to use for this. So far i have looked into using Crystal reports and MS Fox pro reporting but find them frustrating to use. Anyone got any good suggestions? SQL reporting services and/or Word automation any good? here are my basic requirements - letters pull certains bits of information from our DB. - There are a number of conditions on what is displayed on the letter based on how the data looks. - ideally would like ability to easily edit letter templates. this is for basic changes only (e.g non-db driven parts of a letter). would be cool if it was easy enough that a non-IT person could do it. - would need to be able to do batch run of around 1000 letters at a time.
Check out Printshop Mail. It probably does everything you want it to do. But it's expensive.