Monday, October 14, 2013

Authoring XML Publisher Template without the Word Add-on

When Microsoft Office 2013 was first released, I immediately installed and tested it against two major Oracle EBS office add-on: BI Publisher Desktop and Web ADI template.  Both products failed to work because the version I installed was 64 bit version of Office.

After almost a year, BI Publisher Desktop (10.3.4.2) still does not work for 64-bit version of Microsoft Word (at least at this moment Oracle hasn't release it yet), so I think it's time to author BI Publisher template without using the Add-on.  It's also the major reason why I developed XDO Client.

Actually I does not really rely on this Add-on for designing template file long time ago since I can memorize most of the syntax, or at least I can google for a specific syntax pretty easily.  For simple template, I put the syntax directly in the Word document so that it's more read-able for others.  If the syntax is complicated, very long and affect the design, I will put it in a text field.

One of the reason I used the Add-on because I didn't know how to insert a text field in the Word document using proper menu and toolbar buttons.  Yesterday I spent some time to summaries the method of adding text field for different version of Word.  Hopefully it is helpful for others who are looking for this info as well.

2003: View -> Toolbars -> Forms




2007:  Office Orb -> Word Options -> Popular -> Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon



2010: File -> Options -> Customize Ribbon




2013: File -> Options -> Customize Ribbon



4 comments :

Anonymous said...

I gave up on using RTF templates all together. I had to do complex things that turned out to be quite difficult in Word. Not only that, but the RTF templates have a habit of creating paragraph breaks where you don't want them. I switched to XSL-FO templates, then everything difficult became much easier and I had complete control over every small detail. Granted that for very simple templates, RTF is fine, but complex things become SO difficult.

Anonymous said...

The main thing that became extremely easy, after switching to XSL-FO templates, was the pre-printed stationary style overlay. There is currently not a reliable way to do that in RTF, but it is quite easy in XSL-FO.

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