As I have mentioned before, I was intending to replicate the look and feel of the ribbon interface in previous versions of Word and PowerPoint.

It’s official now. I can implement ribbons on Office 2003

After working on this idea, I think I have got a good solution to implement the idea as can be seen in the screen shot below:

The upper half is the ribbon tab of PowerMerge, as seen on PowerPoint 2007.

The bottom half is my new "custom" ribbon tab, as it looks on PowerPoint 2003 (and older versions).

As you can see, the effect is not perfect, but sufficient for my purposes, especially since the PowerPoint 2003 users can’t make a direct comparison between my ribbon and Microsoft’s ribbon.

Now that I think about it, it is funny because people hated the ribbon so much that a product was created to bring back the menus and toolbars of Office 2003 to 2007 while I am doing exactly the opposite.

To be frank, in the particular case of PowerMerge, probably I could make it work using just the toolbar. But PowerTOC will become much more usable when I implement my new custom ribbon system.

I have uploaded a new version of FormsAssistant that includes the following three changes to the product:

• Removed the auto-update system: The auto-update feature has been removed from the product.
• Process and replace fields on headers and footers: A new option has been added to enable using fields inside headers and footers of documents.
• Process and replace fields on text boxes: A new option has been added to enable using fields inside text boxes contained in documents.

Note that the last two features have been added as an option because processing headers, footers and text boxes results in a noticeable delay in the processing of documents.

Please visit the download page to get the new version.

What’s next

This will be the last 1.x version of FormsAssistant. I have just started the development of version 2. Most of the new features have been already implemented and tested, so the new version development will mostly consist in integrating these features on the main application. Therefore I expect beginning the beta test sometime during the next month of September.

The preliminary specification for forms libraries is beginning to take shape. On this post I will present some ideas that .

1. The three different modes of access

FormsAssistant will handle three types of libraries:

• Personal libraries are stored on a user’s computer and are not meant to be shared.
• Shared libraries are stored on a network drive and are supposed to be shared by an entire organization (or at least some users).
• Remote libraries are a mixture of the two. There is a master copy of the library that is stored on a network drive, but local copies of the database are kept on the local disk.

Internally, all three types of libraries are the same, the only difference is the way FormsAssistant accesses them.

Personal and Remote libraries are accessed locally in read mode (i.e. browse and open the forms contained in them). Personal libraries are also accessed locally in write mode (i.e. modify, add or delete forms; restructure categories, etc.).

Shared libraries are accessed remotely for all modes, read and write while Remote libraries are only accessed remotely in write mode and also when checking for updates and update mode.

2. Performance considerations

Personal and Remote libraries are stored locally, and therefore their performance is optimal. Shared libraries performance will, of course, depend on the network performance.

Our suggestion for organizations using shared repositories of forms is to use primarily Shared libraries and only revert to Remote libraries if the browsing forms performance is unacceptable. A typical reason is when the Remote library is not stored in the local network (see below).

3. Sharing considerations

Personal libraries can be shared between different users, but they have to manually copy and update them as needed (of course this process can be automated using an external program that takes care of copying libraries from one system to another).

Shared and Remote libraries are shared by default. FormsAssistant will handle everything for you.

4. Libraries on the cloud

Users of libraries do not need to be physically connected to the same LAN to be able to access them. FormsAssistant will happily work with Web folders to access truly Remote libraries.

In the future, we are planning to offer a hosted solution that will enable you to host your libraries in a centralized location and make them accessible to users all around the globe.

I have just uploaded a new version of FormsAssistant that solves a problem reported by one user. Apparently, on 1.7.5 the multiline editor of the Main window was causing an error.

Please download the new version and install it over your current version of FormsAssistant. It is not necessary to uninstall it previously.

PowerTOC 2.2.4 and FormsAssistant 1.7.5 have been released today. These minor upgrades just solve a minor issue with the Check Install utility that was reporting a security error on Microsoft Office 2007 systems.

(The setup check utility showing a security error)

The security problem was reported on all systems where the default security settings had not being changed, the problem has been solved on version 1.1 of the Setup Check utility that has been added to the new versions of PowerTOC and FormsAssistant.

I have been busy this past week preparing a series of posts regarding our ideas with respect to the next generation of FormsAssistant.

One thing has lead to another, and, at the end the quick and dirty PowerPoint presentation that I used, in an effort to organize logically my ideas, has grown into a complete 8 page document that I have pompously named "Introduction to FormsAssistant v2 -Preliminary specification and description". The cover of the document is shown below:

This document is available for download. (It’s a 1.4 Mb PDF)

My intention is to maintain the document in sync with the development process and use it to explain the new features of the new version to current users and as a promotional tool when the new version is finally released.

My previous experience with Control Runner of publishing on the blog the plans for the future release of an application has been very satisfactory. For that reason, I plan to do the same with FormsAssistant on a series of posts, starting with this one.

As an aside note: Control Runner 4 is going well and the final beta version will be released real soon now (believe me, this is not a joke).

The life-cycle of forms

FormsAssistant v1 is just a convenient way to fill in forms made with Microsoft Word. That was its original intention, and that was what it did. When I designed it, I had in mind a single concern: stop retyping the same information on multiple documents, and rather fetch them from a recently used clips database.

That is good and useful, but it only covers a very limited part of what I have come to call the "Life cycle of forms".

See below a graphical representation of what I believe represents the life of a business form used on any organization

Figure - The life-cycle of forms

In other words, a form:

• Is created, either by the same user that will later use it, or more frequently by the department responsible of setting up corporate procedures.
• Some parts of the form have to be "marked up" as variable information ("fields") that will later filled in by the user.
• The form has to be distributed to made it available for users to access it when needed.
• From time to time, forms have to be modified as the needs may change.
• Users of the form have to fill in the form: fields are replaced with the appropriate information in each use of the form.

FormsAssistant v1 basically relied on Word to create, mark-up and modify forms and on users to archive and distribute forms. It was, in short, a form filling software.

FormsAssistant v2 will still be based on Word (using Word documents) but it will assist in all aspects of the form Life-cycle.

On the next posts I will show you how.

We have released version 1.7.4 of FormsAssistant. As usual, to upgrade to the latest version, download it from our download page and reinstall it over your current installation.

This version addresses two different issues:

1. Remove an error caused when entering very long values (greater than 255 characters).
2. Adds an option to ‘Process unchanged fields‘.

The history of a bug report

Last week we received a support message that informed us that FormsAssistant would cause an error if any of the values on a form was too long. That error would cause that the rest of the values were not processed.

As it turned out, the problem was caused by Word not accepting long strings (i.e. strings with more than 255 characters) as the parameter for the Find and Replace function.

This limitation also occurs when using find and replace manually.

The solution is simple, rather than using always find and replace, FormsAssistant first checks whether the entered value is a long value. If it isn’t, it uses the old method, otherwise it performs a manual (and potentially much slower) manual replace.

While implementing the new functionality, I realized that the ‘Process’ procedure used by FormsAssistant replaced all fields, even those that had not been changed.

Considering that this was a bag programming practice, and remembering my recent discussions about re-processing forms and optional fields, I decided to stop processing fields that had not been edited by the user.

Turning a bug into a feature

Anyone that has been involved in software development knows that users of our programs are usually more savvy that ourselves, and that they use our products in ways that we had not even thought of.

As it turns out, this was the case with the user that pointed out the string too long error.

He had noticed that FormsAssistant replaced fields with Comments when they were not filled in, and used that bad programming practice as a feature of the software. Therefore, he uses Comments to place default values on his forms. Brilliant!

For sheer luck, I had never noticed what was happening because we don’t usually use Comments on our own forms, and therefore had never noticed what would happen if a field with a comment was not edited.

In any event, on the new release with the new option added, we have the best of both worlds:

• Users that want to use Comments as a convenient way of having default values, should check the ‘Process unchanged fields’ option.
• Users that want to process a form multiple times, leaving unprocessed fields intact each time, should uncheck the option.

I have just uploaded a minor upgrade to FormsAssistant. This version solves a problem that has been recently been brought to our attention; FormsAssistant would give an error if entering an empty string as the value of any field. The new version does not cause an error. As usual, you can get the latest version on the download page.

Why would you like to use an empty string?

Even though this was an easy to spot bug on FormsAssistant, we never encountered this error. Why? Because our forms always require all fields to be filled in. When we include a field in one of our forms, the field is meant to be filled in with some relevant information. But of course, your needs might be different. The user that has reported the error to us has given not one, but two different scenarios in which you might want to leave a field empty:

1. Optional fields: The most obvious case is when fields correspond to different options which might or might not be present in the final document. Consider for example a form used to construct an insurance contract. The insurance can cover many different items, but not all items will be covered in all cases. Hence, some “options” will not be filled in each particular contract.
2. Conditional fields: A field will only be used if another one has been already been used. Using the same insurance example, if the insurance includes some item, then there is an option that should be filled-in.

Using optional fields in FormsAssistant

The first case, optional fields, is perfectly covered with the current implementation of FormsAssistant. Simply leave empty the options that are not needed. A template with options, therefore will include some fields like these:

• [Option 1]
• [Option 2]
• [Option 3]

Using conditional fields in FormsAssistant

The use of conditional fields is a different kind of animal. There is one field, [Condition] that should trigger a different set of fields depending on the value entered for the [Condition] field. In its current implementation, FormsAssistant can manage the task, constructing the conditional part of the form template in the following manner (again using the insurance example): [Condition] [OptionA 1|Use if condition is "Car"][OptionB 1|Use if condition is "House"][OptionC 1|Use if condition is "Business"] [OptionA 2|Use if condition is "Car"][OptionB 2|Use if condition is "House"][OptionC 2|Use if condition is "Business"] I agree that this approach requires form templates harder to maintain and prone to errors when filling in the form. For that reason, I have added to the features list of FormsAssistant 2 a better treatment of conditional fields.

At MomSoft, we do have a roadmap. Unfortunately we do not have a clear schedule because the development of applications always seems to take much longer than anticipated. For that reason I will not include dates on the description of our plans for the future.

PowerMerge

PowerMerge is in the pipeline. As its name implies it is an addin for PowerPoint that will make it possible to do “mail merges” inside PowerPoint.

We are pretty excited about this product because there isn’t any viable solution (at least that we know of) for such a mundane task as creating a bunch of presentations by replacing variables with the contents of a database.

I have been working on this add-in for some time now, and things are so far progressing quite nicely.

FormsAssistant 2.0

We are in the final design phase of the upcoming version of our flagship product. Development will start right after the release of PowerMerge.

After much consideration, we are planning to introduce four main enhancements:

1. Libraries of form models.
2. New field types.
3. Simplified field markup by moving field settings out of view.
4. A free form filler application to distribute forms to third parties.

Of course, in the future, the first three will be included in PowerForms. Unfortunately the fourth one will not be possible because it would require creating a new PowerPoint from scratch.

To really advance in the definition of the new version, it is vital that we receive feedback from our users.

PowerLinks

I have been playing with the idea of creating PowerLinks to automate the management of linked images, Excel tables and Excel charts inside PowerPoint presentations.

The add-in will serve two purposes:

• Ensure that only the representation of the tables and charts, but not the underlying data, is accessible from the presentation.
• Automate as much as possible the process of updating the presentations when the data changes.

Control Runner 4.0?

Control Runner is showing its age. I am aware of it.

I plan to start working on the design aspects of Control Runner 4.0 right after the release of FormsAssistant 2.0.

So, I guess that I am not going to be bored in the next couple of months.