Automated document creation

Question

'We' are a sales company that produces quite personalised sales proposals for our potential customers. A lot of shared/generic information is used within these proposals, but a lot of information is built from data that is unique to each customer.

At the minute, we use Apple's Numbers app (we're all on Apple hardware), to tabulate and calculate specific (lighting/electrical) cost data. We then manually take the results from certain fields and then drop them into a Pages document. We add our potential customer's logo to the cover and then print to PDF. Once we have a PDF open in Preview, we 'drag-in' the generic content from other PDFs, before saving as a final document to present.

'Building' a proposal is taking a lot of time and I am looking for a bit of software, both on or offline (but needs to work with Apple) that could help us achieve these kind of things.

I have looked at some online offerings, but they seem to be based around design agencies and I can't picture them being useful for our requirements.

This is what I would like to enter in to the front-end:

• Enter specific information such as cost per kWh, cost of installation etc.
• Have text areas where I could enter text such as "This is what I think you want us to do…"
• Choose products and add them to the proposal
• Calculate return on investment

This is what I would like to happen at the end:

• I would like everything to be 'packaged' as a PDF that I can send/present to my customers.

Answer 1

I would suggest making either a form using or database product like LibreBase or a mail merge using your word processor software like LibreOffice for MAC if you don't have one with this feature. You have a standard template and a second data source and use substitution. You will have to add a bunch of custom fields to suite your needs.

LibreOffice uses <Item> notation. For example <ElectCost> would be used a substitute for the cost of electricity. <CustomerDescription> for that need.

You may need to link LibreCalc (spreadsheet) to do the math calculations. You can Export to PDF directly from LibreWriter. The only issue I see is "Choose products and add them to the proposal" You can add all the products to a single field and have them appear. However, someone else may know a better way.

Answer 2

As Cybernard mentioned using Libre Office on the Mac and automation/form filling is probably a great way to go given your requirements. The PDF export is high quality so you are likely to get the results you want. You can set up a "template" with fields and when you need to create a PDF you'd do this:

1. open your template (in Libre Office / Open Office)
2. navigate to each field and fill it in
3. export to PDF

Docmosis (please note I work for Docmosis) has a product called Tornado. It's primary purpose is to provide an engine for applications to do document creation (PDF, DOC etc) by merging data into templates. Tornado also has a test area that you can choose one of your templates, enter data into a web page and create the output in various formats. It's a manual play area which might suit your immediate needs and if you want to fully automate the process later you can call it's API (REST web services) from an application that has access to your data also. It runs on many platforms including OSX.

I hope that helps.