EleExxel - the print and output generator for product and price lists

EleExxel allows multi-line export of data in Elestore to well-formatted multi-line MS Excel sheets.

Practical usage:

• Generate well formatted MS Excel sheets from Elestore content as a simple form of database publishing
• Generate nicely formatted and individually calculated product and price lists in MS Excel
• Generate product lists in HTML with links to detailed product pages in HTML and/or to the EleAIS web server database.

The EleExxel software is available in different forms:

• As stand-alone product incorporating a basic version of the Elestore content database
• As an optional module extending Elestore
• As a combined product together with Elecalc, Elequote and/or other members of EleFamily
• Or as an integral part of ElePricelist, which always comprises of the full EleExxel product.

Purpose of EleExxel

MS Excel has excellent formatting and printing as well as very comprehensive exporting capabilities with support for many different data formats. Almost everybody knows how to use MSExcel and this software is available on most computers anyway.

This is why EleExxel provides comfortable and comprehensive mechanisms for using MSExcel for the data stored inside the Elestore database. EleExxel acts on the Elestore data as an output and print generator as well as an export manager supporting most physical data formats in use today.

The standard Elestore software already fully embeds MSExcel both as a QuickEditing tool as well as an export target for data from the Elestore database. This has been available since one of the first Elestore releases way back in early 2004.

EleExxel now extends this by providing even far more comprehensive capabilities in using MSExcel especially for formatting multi-line data output from the Elestore database. EleExxel provides simple, quick, yet very powerful features for using MSExcel as an universal output and print generator and a product and price list generator for data in Elestore.

User-defined templates

Everybody who knows MS Excel can create individual EleExxel templates or extend those template files that come with the standard product.

Three types of output and templates

There are three different types of templates and forms of output, which can be generated by EleExxel:

EleExxel with repeatable templates

When using "repeatable templates" one MSExcel template sheet is duplicated as many times as there are article objects to generate. Each of these repeated copies will be filled with the data of one article object. As a consequence, each of these copies of the template file looks fairly identical in their layout although each of them contains different data.

This one repeatable template sheet therefore defines the layout and the formatting of all exported data objects although the number of generated rows can vary depending on the existence or absence of data content. This template type contains links to data fields but no references to data objects whose data is generated, because they are defined by searches, selections or externally by the operator.

This form of using EleExxel is the preferred one when a relatively large amount of data objects is to be generated fully automatically in a fairly uniform layout. Creating this one repeatable template is much simpler and quicker compared to the two other template types, which allow much more individual and varying layouts. Any MSExcel user can do.

EleExxel with predefined, non-repeatable template pages

This type of EleExxel template sheet allows much more individual and flexible layout and formatting structures. The fundamental difference to the repeatable template is in the fact that the pages exist preformatted in the template file but yet without content, of course, because no automatic duplication of the template is performed in this case.

This type of EleExxel template contains links to data fields as well as to data objects while the repeatable template type only contains references to data fields and the objects whose data is generated are defined by searches, selections or externally by the operator.

The automation offered by this template type is in the fact that the template sheet is fully automatically filled with varying data by EleExxel. However, every page must already be contained in the template file, because no automatic duplication of repeated layouts takes place in this case.
The great advantage of this template type is in the very much higher flexibility of individually designing pages, which are then automatically filled by EleExxel with up-to-date content from the database. This template type is ideally suit-able for very differently formatted product or price lists where many or even each page can look different from the rest.

EleExxel generating one mother article per page primarily for HTML

The third type of EleExxel template sheet allows generating one page for every article object. This is primarily used for generating HTML pages from Elestore content. In these cases one generated page typically consists of one article object and its variants, in other words one-page consist of one mother article and some or all of its children (variants).

This template type is the preferred solution when generating HTML pages with EleExxel but it is only rarely suitable for output to PDF or the printer.

Views of sample output generated by EleExxel will be shown here soon.