Which product is apt for me

Hello,
Thank you for your request.
Could you clarify what kind of example from the demo you will not compile? We will investigate it and provide your more detailed information. See examples of the implementation and results you can look at the Live Demo section on our site. https://demos.aspose.com/

Hi
Thanks for your request. I managed to reproduce the problem. Please use full names for Math.DivRem, Math.Min and math.Max. You should use System.Math.DivRem, System.Math.Max and System.Math.Min. Hope this helps.
Best regards,

Hi,

In addition to the questions, I have asked you earlier, I have the following questions :

I would like to explain our process of mail merge a little and then you can let me know whether your product has all the feasiblity we are looking for.

1.Our mail merge will consist of a template created in Microsoft word and our datasource will be MS Excel.
2. We will compare the template and datasource to see if all the merge fields are present in the excel datasource or not (here we validate this and log messages here).
3. Then we will do the mail merge and separate the documents for each record and then convert the document to PDF.

My question is whether we will have any control in the programming part or not. That is we have to use your API (like mailmerge() function) and send parameters, is that all or do we have any control to do our own programming.

Also as our mail merge includes both word and excel, then is Aspose .words is the best product for us nor not?

Thanks

Hi
Thank you for additional information.

  1. You can easily use Excel document as data source. Since you can easily select data from excel file using ADO.NET. It would be very easy to use these data for mail merge.
  2. You can easily get names of merge fields in the document using MailMerge.GetFieldNames() method. Then you can compare names in your template with names of fields in your data source.
  3. Please follow the link to learn how to create a separate document for each record in your data source during mail merge:
    https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/mail-merge-and-reporting/
    You should prepare data for mail merge and then use Aspose.Words API to execute mail merge and save document in appropriate format.

Yes, I think, that you need only Aspose.Words to achieve what you need.
Hope this helps.
Best regards,

In continuation to our research, I have more questions now :

  1. Which office versions do you support for mail merge, meaning the template need to be in which version of office?
  2. What would be version of the PDF (Adobe version) when converted after mail merge?
  3. Do clients need to have Adobe on their machines or not?
  4. What will happen when newer version of office/Adobe are released?
  5. Say we used your product to develop this, and then need to deliver our application to the clients, then do they also need to buy your softwared?. Basically, how the deployments work?
  6. If you release any upgrades to your product, how do the upgrades work? Do we need to change anything in our code? How do the pricing work?
  7. If I want to try to develop some prototype to test your product, how can I do that?
  8. If after buying your product, if we figure out that it is not suitable for our requirements, is there any refund we will get?.
  9. If we run into any issues, how your technical support would be?

I really appreciate your quick response, as we are in a hurry to decide upon this.

Thank you

Hello
Thanks for your inquiry.

  1. Which office versions do you support for mail merge, meaning the template needs to be in which version of office?
    Aspose.Words supports DOC files created using MS Word starting from Word 97. Also, please see the following link to learn more about file formats supported by Aspose.Words:
    https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/supported-document-formats/
  2. What would be version of the PDF (Adobe version) when converted after mail merge?
    Any document loaded into Aspose.Words can be converted to PDF that conforms to the PDF 1.5 or PDF/A-1b specification.
  3. Do clients need to have Adobe on their machines or not?
    Aspose.Words is independent from Adobe Acrobat, and its settings also cannot affect Aspose.Words. So you do not need to install Adobe Acrobat.
  4. What will happen when newer version of office/Adobe are released?
    Usually it takes around two or three months to add new format. This depends from format. If format is well documented, then it takes less time, if format is poor documented or undocumented at all, this will take longer.
  5. Say we used your product to develop this, and then need to deliver our application to the clients, then do they also need to buy your softwared?. Basically, how the deployments work?
    You can deploy the Aspose.Words component as a referenced component within your product. Regarding the license, please ask this question in the Aspose.Purchase forum:
    https://forum.aspose.com/c/purchase/6
  6. If you release any upgrades to your product, how do the upgrades work? Do we need to change anything in our code? How do the pricing work?
    Every Aspose license carries one-year subscription for free upgrades to new versions released during this time. So, you can check the expiration date of your license and upgrade to the newest version.
    Sometimes during update, there can be some breaking changes in API. But, there should not be any troubles with updating a code. Usually, these changes are minor and all these changes are described in the release notes, and it will not take a lot of time and efforts to change your code and recompile your application.
  7. If I want to try to develop some prototype to test your product, how can I do that?
    You can easily download Aspose.Words for evaluation. The evaluation download is the same as the purchased download. The evaluation version simply becomes licensed when you add a few lines of code to apply the license.
    The evaluation version of Aspose.Words (without a license specified) provides full product functionality, but it inserts an evaluation watermark at the top of the document on open and save, and limits the maximum document size to several hundred paragraphs.
    If you want to test Aspose.Words without the evaluation version limitations, you can also request a 30-day Temporary License. Please refer to How to get a Temporary License?
  8. If after buying your product, if we figure out that it is not suitable for our requirements, is there any refund we will get?.
    Please ask this question in Aspose.Purchuse forum:
    https://forum.aspose.com/c/purchase/6
  9. If we run into any issues, how your technical support would be?
    Please see the following link to learn more about Aspose.Words technical support:
    https://forum.aspose.com/t/free-support-policies/162313

In additional, all fixes and new features are always included into new versions.

Best regards,

Thank you so much for your response.

One more question, does ASPOSE .words support taking two PDF files and merging them as a single PDF?

Hello
Thanks for your request. Aspose.Words works only with Word document formats, e.g. DOC, DOCX, RTF etc.
Using Aspose.Words you can concatenate separate Word documents together and then convert the resulted document to PDF.
Regarding PDF, you should use Aspose.Pdf.Kit to works with PDF documents.
Best regards,

Hi,

Do you have any features of MS Word that you do not support in mail merge using ASPOSE .words product?

Hi there,
Thanks for your inquiry.
Aspose.Words supports most features when mail merging, please see this article here for details.
Thanks,

Hi,

We have started using Aspose .words in VS2005(c#). We have done a mail merge using Office 2010 word template and 2010 excel as a datasource

We are encountering the following issues as of now:

  1. The currency format is not coming out right in the final output PDF
    The template has the following code MERGEFIELD “Total_Call” # “$,0.00;(,0.00)”
    The datasource has value as 100000.11
    The output in the PDF is $100000.11 (Expected output is $100,000.11)

  2. The table of figures in word template is not supported in the final output

  3. The comments in word template are removed in the final output

  4. Image quality in word template has reduced in output PDF.

Please let me know if you have any solutions to these issues.

Thanks,

Hello
Thanks for your request.

  1. As I can see MS Word shows the same result. I use the following code for testing:
Document doc = new Document("C:\\Temp\\in.docx");
CultureInfo currentCulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
doc.MailMerge.Execute(new string[] { "Total_Call" }, new object[] { 100000.11 });
doc.Save("C:\\Temp\\out.docx");
doc.Save("C:\\Temp\\out.pdf");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = currentCulture;

Regarding next three questions, could you please attach your input and output documents with problems here for testing? I will check them and provide you more information.
Best regards,

Hi,

Thank you for your response.

Regarding the first issue I checked the code you sent us. As the number is unformatted,it is displaying without any formatting. But if I send as a string with formatting then it is displaying with right formatting.

My requirement is that in excel we will format the number and the same formatting should be displayed in the output. HOw can I achieve this?

For all my queries, I am attaching the template(template_2010.docx),datasource(Data_2010.xslx) and also the output file(POC_Test_20100.pdf), I have used.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Hi,

I am waiting to hear from you. Any update on my previous email.

Thank you.

Hi,

In addition to my earlier email with the issues we are facing, we found one more issue with the mailmerge.

After the mail merge is done, the final output file(PDF) size is really huge. I generated a word document with the mail merge and printed it into PDF using Adobe, the size is 82 KB. But when I used Aspose .words mailmerge function to save as PDF, the PDF fille size is 326 KB, which is almost 4 times more than the usual file that is getting generated when printed using Adobe.

This is a huge bottleneck for us, as many of our clients store the documents in the database and if the file sizes grows by 4 times, then it will be a big problem for them.
For us to consider using Aspose product, we need this to be fixed.

We liked all the existing features of ASPose, but this issue is very critical for us. Please let us know ASAP if there is anything you can do about this. This is highly critical for us, so your quick response to this is really appreciated.

Thank you and also we are waiting to hear solutions to our previous email with issues we encountered.

Hello

Thanks for your inquiry.

  1. Aspose.Words uses standard .NET functions to format values. So you should use the appropriate switches, i.e. switches that properly work with .NET string formatter.
    So, please try using the following switch.
    { MERGEFIELD test # #,##0.00 }
  2. I cannot reproduce the problem with Table of Figure during converting DOC to PDF, it looks exactly the same as in the input document.
  3. Unfortunately, currently there is no way to render comments and revision marks using Aspose.Words. In one of future versions of Aspose.Words we will consider adding an ability to show revisions and comments in the rendered documents (PDF, XPS, SWF, Image). Your request has been linked to the appropriate issue. We will let you know once this feature is available.
  4. Regarding the problem with quality of images, as I can see, the images look like in the input document. (quality is the same). But as a variant, please try specifying JpegQuality to 100. See the following piece of code:
PdfSaveOptions options = new PdfSaveOptions();
options.JpegQuality = 100;

Best regards,

Regarding the size of PDF document.
Size of PDF documents can be reduced only by doing the following:

  1. Decreasing size of images inside PDF (this can be done only be decreasing quality).
  2. Subsetting fonts, which are embedded into the PDF documents. (Aspose.Words does this by default).
  3. Compression of text (Usually decreasing of size is not very big)
  4. Using “Core fonts”. “Core fonts” are 14 fonts, which are supported by PDF viewers by default. We can optionally get rid embedding of these fonts into PDF. But, unfortunately, this feature is not supported by Aspose.Words at the moment. I will let you know once it is available.
    Difference in side of PDF document generated by Aspose.Words and MS Word can be explained by different way of subsetting fonts. For example, if you try to convert a larger document to PDF the size different will be unnoticeable.
    Best regards,

Hi,

When I was searching online, I found in one of your forums somebody reported the same issue, and also an issue is raised in your internal issue tracking system with issue id: CELLSNET-14768. in March,2010.

Can you please let me know if you have any progress on this?. This issue fix is really critical for us to consider Aspose or not.

Thanks,

Hi
Thanks for your request. This number of issue is related to Aspose.Cells product. Please write to the appropriate forum to check the status of this issue:
https://forum.aspose.com/c/cells/9
My colleagues from Aspose.Cells team will answer you shortly.
Best regards,

I understand that this might be Aspose .cells issue. But can’t you do the same fix in Aspose .words.?

Do you think there is no way you can fix this issue? Till now, we were thinking to consider Aspose, may be now, we have to research other products, if you cannot fix this issue.