We have a legacy system that produces reports (up to 255 characters wide).
I can get these reports to a windows machine as text.
Then I load the report in Word and set font sizes, margins,
landscape/portrait etc to produce the report to a laser printer.

Can Word automatically make it fit?
If not, I could group the reports by 4 to 6 different widths, etc to fit in
a Word document -- less than 80, upto 132, upto 200, upto 255 character wide.

Then I want to have a desktop icon for each report.

So as a flow ---
Legacy system produces a file called "TEST"
TEST is copied to windows machine.(Control lines for Word could be inserted
here).
An Icon called TEST is on desktop to start Word and format as a laser report.

Our Word is from Office 2003.

I'm a Word novice, but have decades of computer experience.

I'm asking for general directions, just a flow of the correct steps, to do
this. If I know the correct direction I can work out the details.

Hi ?B?QnJhZA==?=,

We have a legacy system that produces reports (up to 255 characters wide).
I can get these reports to a windows machine as text.
Then I load the report in Word and set font sizes, margins,
landscape/portrait etc to produce the report to a laser printer.

Can Word automatically make it fit?
If not, I could group the reports by 4 to 6 different widths, etc to fit in
a Word document -- less than 80, upto 132, upto 200, upto 255 character wide.

I'm not sure what you mean by "automatically make it fit". Word will
automatically break text at the right margin (word wrap), so technically there
would be no need to limit width. Generally, a newline character is inserted
only when you want to start a new paragraph.

If your system doesn't work that way (newline inserted whenever the set width
is reached) then 80 is probably a good choice if you don't want to "fiddle" the
text after it's opened to remove extraneous line breaks. This is the kind of
problem one runs into a lot when copying/pasting email messages into Word, for
example. When we run into this, we generally run a Find/Replace routine (three
steps) to remove line breaks within paragraphs.

Then I want to have a desktop icon for each report.

So as a flow ---
Legacy system produces a file called "TEST"
TEST is copied to windows machine.(Control lines for Word could be inserted
here).
An Icon called TEST is on desktop to start Word and format as a laser report.

Our Word is from Office 2003.

I'm a Word novice, but have decades of computer experience.

I'm asking for general directions, just a flow of the correct steps, to do
this. If I know the correct direction I can work out the details.


Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

Cindy,

Thanks for offering help.

These reports are mostly over 80 characters per line, so I have been
changing font sizes and using landscape to get up to 255 characters on a
line, but this requires trial and error.

I'm looking for a "make it fit" where Word will choose the font size and
spacing to fit the original report to a page. But as I tried to explain in
the original post this isn't critical, I can separate the different width
reports to just a few major sizes and have a different template, form, style
-- whatever the correct term is --- for each width report.

The real trick is producing the desktop icon tied to this report, formatted
correctly, so a user can just click, see the report, and choose to print if
desired.

Hi ?B?QnJhZA==?=,

The real trick is producing the desktop icon tied to this report, formatted
correctly, so a user can just click, see the report, and choose to print if
desired.

This group is specific for end-user questions; you won't find programming help
here.

If you mean, you want to produce the icon using program code, you're certainly
asking in the wrong group. You need to ask this in a group for the programming
environment you're using, as it would require using the Windows API

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or
reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

Ok, if that part won't work, what is the correct way to save a "blank"
document with formatting infomation - such as landscape, 8 pt font, character
spacing etc - so the report can be loaded and take on these settings? Is this
a template? Or what is the correct concept?

Hi ?B?QnJhZA==?=,

Ok, if that part won't work, what is the correct way to save a "blank"
document with formatting infomation - such as landscape, 8 pt font, character
spacing etc - so the report can be loaded and take on these settings? Is this
a template?

Yes, that would be a template. Assign a template to an icon, and when you
double-click you'll get a new document based on the template. The problem of
getting the report text into the document would remain, however.

You're rather vague about what kind of programming environment you'll be working
with, which version of Word, etc. which makes it really difficult to give you
workable suggestions. From the sound of it, though, I have to wonder if it
wouldn't make sense to have an interface that transforms the pure text you're
getting to one of these file formats, that can be opened in Word and saved as a
Word document, if one wishes:
- RTF (any version of Word)
- Word's round-trip HTML (2000 and later)
- WordProcessingML (2003)

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)