AnsaNet recently had the requirement of automating an operation that depended heavily on a library of technical documents created using Word. To achieve this the the structure of the documents was formalised, so that they could be submitted to a database, but could also continue to be edited using Word.

Using MS Office as a component of a system saves development time becase complex functionality doesn't have to be written from scratch, and also offers the reassurance that the functionality has been thoroughly tested. With a large amount of company data stored in Access databases, Excel spreadsheets and Word documents, there is a strong argument for writing systems that report directly from this data, or can even be run from within the Office application.

This functionality was implemented using a Word Add-In that displayed the submitted documents. The program also provided an interface to perform tasks such as re-generating the documents from the database for further editing, or printing documents with bar-code information for the automation of subsequent tasks.