Document generation software, part III: how to impress your boss quickly and easily

Monday. Another rainy day at the office. As your boss arrives – grumpier than his usual self – he says: 

"Joe, I need you here. Now."

Your heart pounds. Sure, your boss is a person with lots of responsibilities – but something looks definitely wrong. What could it be? Did you miss something important? Does he think you're killing off time during your work hours? Did he find someone else to replace you? – No, that can't be. You have always been a dedicated employee. Maybe not perfect, but you've always been there. 

But then, what could he possibly want?
 
Your heart pounds. And then, it races. But you need to go to his room and face what he wants. And, trying to be as calm as you can possibly be – at least on the inside, you walk into your boss' room, expecting the worst. 

"Joe," – he starts talking again, showing now nervous and anxious he is – "we have a reunion with one of our most important clients today, and that company said that they need to see a report showing how concrete their return of investment has been 6 months ago and wants to see how estimates 6 months from now. We only have one hour to get this data and to create a presentation that will impress them, so hurry."

Your heart pounds. How come you have been told just now of something so important?! How can you do that in one your with the complicated reporting tools you have at your disposal? And – most importantly – how can you do that in one hour? You need to use all that complicated software again and do the job thee times: once to get the data, another to get it imported into the file format you want, and, finally to tweak your presentation – because, more often than not, your presentation will be broken "out of the box", and you need to tweak it!

Knowing how much is at stake, you tell yourself, "I'm so fired. I can't do this in one hour."

Stop right there. Who told you that you can't do this? You can! But we have bad news and great news: the bad news is that there's no software that can do that in an hour. The good news, however, is that there's something out there that can do it in less than five minutes. 

The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Meet Windward Reports. Windward Reports, this is Joe User. Joe User, this is Windward Reports – wait, what am I saying?

Believe it or not, Windward Reports  knows you already. Although you probably don't know much about it, this software knows what type of user you are, what you want, and what you need to get your job done as painlessly as possible. But how come, after all, that Windward Reports knows about what you need?

The reason Windward Reports knows and understands you is because they have been spending years researching what you really need and want. After experiencing it, retrieving information from a database with a program and then using another program retrieving information from a database and then using another to get your presentation formatted into a certain file (DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, et cetera) will be a thing of the past. And why is that?

You see, Windward Reports is something different from the competition: after it gets installed, all you need is to use Microsoft Office to get your job done – and you'll need to do it only in a single step, which will take not an hour, but five minutes. You can get as innovative and flashy as you want, or just as austere and minimalistic – you see, Windward Reports is versatile, and can impress you with many different template styles – or you can easily create your own in Word, just as you are always used to do. No longer you'll need to read lengthy instructions about how to get started: now, it is you that are in control – not your software.

Wait – what are you still waiting for? Hurry! Convince your boss to purchase Windward Reports right now: buying it takes less than one or two minutes, as it is available digitally. Also, integrating it into your workflow will take virtually no time. After your purchase, watch as your wonderful presentation gets generated instantly – getting your boss out of his grumpy mood and getting you some time to relax. In fact, your buss might be so happy about that deal with his big client he might give you a big promotion.

Document-generation software, part II: how should them be?

You already know the story:  your company is growing and you need standardized tools to generate help manuals, FAQs and technical manuals in multiple languages. Maybe, just maybe, you are a computer-savvy user already, and even tried free alternative like LaTeX or Docgen yourself.

But let's face it: some tools are very time-consuming. Do you really want to get a book to Learn LaTeX or to face the limited quirks of Docgen?

No, I'm sure you don't.  Therefore, document generation tools should be easy and reliable to use, and provide a minimum learning curve.

How a document-generation tool should not be.

• A good document-generation tool should not be outdated. Take a look at Docgen again. As you can see on their site (http://sourceforge.net/projects/protege-docgen/) the last update was two years ago. That's a lot of time! Who knows how many bugs are lying right there, waiting for some hacker to get them exploited?

• A good document-generation tool should not have a bad support team. And this is not just the problem of Docgen; many open-source tools, as LaTeX or Doxygen, have an informal support team that consists, basically, of technical members – usually developers of the project themselves. That would be all nice and great, except for something: they hate when laypeople ask them "dumb" questions. Well, newsflash: of course they are "dumb!" The developer knows everything about the project, and the user just to generate his report and be done with it. He certainly does *not* want to look at the project's source code just to figure out some obscure functions.

• A good document-generation Tool Should not be filled with half-baked tools. We've seen this everywhere – even in commercial software. Now imagine the world of *free* software: it has the same problem, except it is multiplied by tenfold: LaTeX, for instance, requires you to be proficient with a text editor. If you aren't, well... you can use some interfaces like Lyx, but beware: your source text may misbehave, the manually inserted formula you just posted might give you the wrong output, and the templates are just plain hard to modify.

• A good document-generation Tool Should not be hard to use. Again, this is true when it comes to most of the document-generation tools out there, both open source and commercial: they might require that you spend time on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), hoping that some developer will be there, answering your question – which is usually urgent, as you have business to do, too – and then, he asks, have you seen the [outdated] documentation of our project? Or worse: you can hear things like, just google it, or RTFM (search this one out and see what it means; it is not something nice). And be certain of one thing: if you rely on these tools, you might end up reading this words on IRC a lot. If you are fired by your boss because you spend a lot of time "chatting" (which it obviously isn't true), don't say you were not warned.

But then... how should a good document-generation tool be?

• A good document-generation tool should focus on the user, not on the developer. And yet, many developers seem to ignore this, which is truth not only to these tools, but it the basis of well-developed software. If you are developing software for an artist, you must think like an artist; if you are developing software for a book publisher, then you must think like a book publisher; and, obviously, if you are developing for people that want documents generated without concern of how they should look like, how should you develop a this piece of software? Yes, exactly: with the user in mind. If you ever meet a developer and he talks to you about a killer feature, then ask him this: "well, how does this killer feature helps me boost my productivity?"

• A good document-generation tool should have a low learning curve. This has been discussed before, but it cannot be stressed enough: people that look for document-generating software are looking for something that will generate beautiful, quick documents for them. If they have to spend 6 months just how to generate a document, then what's the point? They could just grab a word processor or a presentation tool and do it themselves, and it would be faster and more productive.

• A good document-generation tool should have a well-trained support team that speaks the language of its users. Again, this sounds obvious, but believe it or not, many projects (and commercial companies) forget about this. A well-trained support team should speak the language of the user, and not force him/her to do the opposite. Furthermore, check if the software you want to download / purchase has online support: it's certainly useful if you do get stuck at some point while doing your tasks.