Populating reports/letters by using Word instead of Crystal Reports in a C# application?

Question

I'll preface by saying that these reports are generated through a C# application;

I have customers who send me a template (Word-document) for a letter or report which they wish to populate with data (text, images, etc) from their database (which is used by their CRM system). Usually I will have to re-design these in Crystal Reports and add all necessary tags and fields. Which is a time-consuming job, and not really what I should be focusing on.

So what I'm wondering about is, can I use the Word-document directly to setup a report which can be filled with data? (Possibly in a C# service/application?)

Considering that at any given time there are many users trying to generate letters and reports, is this an efficient method of generating reports?

And finally, if this isn't a practical option, are there any other good alternatives to Crystal Reports?

Answer 1

I do not know of a way to use a Word document as a template for a Crystal Report.

The best option that I can think of on this is to use the Mail Merge functionality within Word which allows you to set up fields that are populated dynamically from a database.

This probably isn't the best solution if you are looking to provide a easy way for the end user to run these reports, but it's the best answer you've gotten so far. haha :)

Answer 2

I have done this before. I maintained a repository of Word documents for a state agency that an ASP.NET application would write to.

What you need is bookmarks in your MS Word document. You can populate the bookmarks programmatically.

You may not be using ASP.NET, but here is an example that can show you some C# and MS Word document bookmark interaction.

Hopefully that can give you an idea of wether or not this would be worthwhile.

Your other option is to use Sharepoint. If it is not installed currently, I do not recommend this route!!