Being able to create a Template Document is critical in the Document Automation process. This tutorial demonstrates the Template Document's role in the Document Automation process as well as showing how to create a MergeField in your document.

Requirements

• Microsoft Word 2007
• Basic word processing skills

Objectives

• To be able to understand the concept of a Template Document
• To be able to create a MergeField
• To be able to incorporate the document into the WordFusion Library

The Template Document's Purpose

The Template Document is a normal word document that can be reused many times without further adjustment to the original document. For example, if you wish to write a memo to all of the staff stating that you wish them a Merry Christmas you would want to personalise this to each staff member to make them feel extra special, however you don't have time to write out a memo for each member of your staff. Document Automation is the perfect solution for you.

For example you may have a memo similar to the following:

Dear Christina O'Reily,

Thank you for your hard efforts this year, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Yours Sincerely,
Harry McNeil
 

In this example you wish to replace the name 'Christina O'Reily' with each employee that you have. To do this we use MergeFields to automatically replace the name, saving you to rewriting the memo numerous times.

Creating a MergeField

We are now going to replace the name 'Christina O'Reilly' with a MergeField so to proceed first select the area where we wish to place the MergeField, in this case it would be 'Christina O'Reilly'. To create a MergeField in Microsoft Word 2007 you select the Insert tab,

then you proceed to the Text section of the ribbon and click on Quick Parts, from here select Field.

You have now entered the Field dialog where there are numerous Field types to choose from. We are interested in MergeField so scroll down under Field names until you find this Field, click on it and properties pertaining this Field type will be displayed. We are only interested in Field name at this stage, the other section will be covered in a later tutorial. We will call this MergeField Employee, naming your Fields with meaning, in this example Employee saves a lot of potential problems with more complicated templates so it's good idea to get into good habits now.

Click Ok and you should see 'Christina O'Reilly' replaced with '«Employee»'. So intsead our memo would look like this:

Dear «Employee»,

Thank you for your hard efforts this year, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Yours Sincerely,
Harry McNeil
 

Finishing Up

Now that we have finished writing our document we need to save it and incorporate it with WordFusion so that it can be used as part of the Document Automation process. It is a good idea to save the document as a 'dot' file, meaning it's a Template Document, to do this you click Save As and where it says Save as type: change this to 'dot'.

You could save it as a 'dotx' if you wish but this could be problematic for previous version of Microsoft Word to open the file.

Now we open up WordFusion and add our tutorials folder, in which our first Template Document is located, to our Library. We will go into libraries in a later tutorial, for now we will use the default library, it will probably have a Samples folder already added, we will ignore this for the time being. Click Add Folder under the Library section of the ribbon.

Browse to your tutorial folder and click Ok, you will now see it displayed under the Form Library, and your Template Document should be visible under Forms and Document Templates.

Conclusion

With the ability to create simple Template Documents you can now begin to create a Form in the next tutorial that collects the data, in our example the employees' names.