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.
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