RE: Word Layout in Documents. Why not?
I've also used Word templates a lot for document reports (and an improved Excel buffer for all other new reports. We only used RDLC when modifying existing reports) in a previous job. It speeds up development a lot!
There is a few limitations that one should be aware of:
- If you or an user need to edit the template, you need to have a Word license. You also need to have word on the client to show preview (i think - workaround is to just print to PDF).
- Word layout does not support show/hide expressions (it is not supported by the 3rd party word merger Microsoft are using for NAV/BC). So you cannot let the word template decide which information should be shown or not. This also means that all your pages should be identical template wise (you can control if a field has as value or not in your dataset from NAV/BC, but you cannot show/hide i.e. a field based on another fields value directly in the word template). If you want i.e. your document totals in a frame in the footer on the last page in your document, you cannot do that in standard NAV/BC i think - it will at least show the frame on every pages footer… And you even have to be a bit creative to get that result :-).
- Word layout does not support transfer footers/headers
- You cannot remove a image dynamically - you'll get a grey box (but you can replace it with a 1x1 white dot in your dataset :-) )
There are probably more minor limitations I forgot about... Some you can work around easily and some are a bit harder (I've been involved in creating a post-processing PDF editor in my former work to fix some of it. It just required everything to be printed as PDF for the PDF-post-processer before actually beeing printed...
