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Towing invoice template word for Production

uh hello my name is adam i'm a product manager at windward and today i'm going to be showing a tutorial on using the windward designer to create a basic invoice template this will be a series of videos i'll try and keep them pretty short and manageable and what we're going to try and do is design this output um design a template that produces this output document and you see we have it's a basic invoice we have some fun formatting in here there's a lot you could do to make it more exciting but this is a great start for us to create a industry standard document now before we get started this tutorial isn't necessarily to cover basic functionality or even to cover uh well yeah basic functionality but what you can do is if you come here to ohana this is our our documentation resource we have lots of good documentation here and then if you click the new user start here this will bring you to a tool that lets you select your format that you're wishing to design for as well as a data provider that you're wishing to use and it'll bring you to a tutorial that walks you through using that template um designer this case word that we selected and the data provided that you selected the template that we're going to be building the invoice we're going to be using sql but the concepts will apply to other data providers as well especially data providers who have wizards as they're called in windward that help you when you're designing those would be xml json odata and also salesforce um any of those data providers will use wizards and the tutorial will be fairly similar so it'd be worth walking through for the formatting experience and also for the the experience with our tool um on that note let's get started so we'll open a new word document i have a blank word document here that i've already saved locally on my machine is windwardinvoicetutorial.docx that's all we've done so far um and we've opened here word where we have installed the windward designer um and of course the wayward designer is an add-in to word that allows you to leverage very complicated word formatting functionality and all we try and handle on the windward side is taking your data and putting it into that word template and that is what we'll be doing today so let's start working towards this desired output um and for this first video what we're going to start with is just formatting this header the way that i format this header here and the way we'll do it in our template here is actually using a table now a table can be very powerful in your document and allow you to really control formatting throughout the document and if you remove the table borders the end user will not even know that it's there so to start with this we're going to fill in the same text here when we're invoice sample and i'm actually going to make the entire template in times new roman and since this is our header at the top of the page let's increase the font size on this to make it more stand out um something for this one i want something that just goes on to two lines um so that looks nice now what we're aiming for you'll notice is that we have the title here left justified and on the other side we can have the success text right justified so if we start filling this in success at one word dot net um and that automatically makes a link but i'm gonna make it not a hyperlink for the appearance um the way i can write justify this in the cell is if i highlight it here i go to layout um i can specify a line in the top right of the cell so that's what i'm going to go ahead and do for the sake of time instead of typing all of these in what i'm just going to do is copy and paste you're welcome to enter these and include them in your template or you get the idea um so there we go so far so good um looking like what we have here at the top a nicely formatted title uh but what we need to do is remove the borders on this table um if we if we highlight the border like this what we can do is go to borders here in our table design ribbon and there's a lot of different settings you can take advantage of here if i'm removing borders and if i want restricted borders what i start off by doing is just removing all the borders and you'll notice that i actually have a setting enabled right now that's called show border grid lines and you can see that the table is still shown here with the grid lines enabled i enable this setting just through the search bar here if you type in view table you see it brings up here view table gridlines and if you turn that off and on in the template it will remove or reveal those gridlines whether or not the table borders are actually shown so now we see more what we're expecting to see on our output a nice title some help text for users who need to get in touch with our success team and no table grid lines to review that we're doing this in a table now something you'll want to know when you're working with tables like this uh in general with tables not just like this is that you can alter the location of the table i'm going to turn my show table gridlines back on so you can see exactly where this table is you can alter the location of this table in the document in line by entering or deleting text above this will work you know if you have paragraphs pair perhaps here so on so forth windward works very well with this when the table is in line so when word knows this table is after the paragraph here and before the paragraph here if you do drag this table using this selector using this uh thing here that you can drag i'm not sure what to call that um what this does is it turns this table into something absolutely positioned in the document and it makes it very confusing to the windward add-in where this table actually exists in the scheme of the document it becomes unclear whether it's before or after these paragraphs so if you do need to alter the location of the table in the document it suggested that you do so our paragraph has gone all together now i guess it's preferable that you do so by changing the this is an example of how problematic this could be i was hitting ctrl z and control y to try and bring it back or or get back to where i was but it's totally gone now so it's preferable that you only ever change the location in the template of the table by inserting text before or removing text after you can do new lines you can do section breaks but don't drag the table manually my my grid lines are here view table grid lines oh dear what has happened this is the downside of a candid demo like this bear hello me well i seem to have lost my cursor completely okay i'm gonna do is i'm gonna just start a new document oh wait something happened okay i'll start a new document i don't see any paragraph marker in here at all so an interesting start to the demo okay well we'll start up a new document instead of repeating those steps what i do is i actually have the same table here in the output i'm going to copy and paste it into our template and save and we'll be back to where we started um i'll save in documents and i'm going to overwrite the template that we were using before windward inverse tutorial it's open all right okay wonderful hopefully the first and last hiccup so point stands don't drag these tables that ended poorly um it seems like word itself can't handle that very well so we'll we'll let that remain in line all right back to our templating experience here the last thing we'll do in this video we're just getting a start here we've set up our header we'll use this table method of formatting data in a table you can see a dot here in a paragraph there those are being indicated because i have this show hide enabled so we'll stop showing those but we'll be using this table method for formatting our document a lot in this template and we'll be adding and removing borders like that it's a very powerful tool that we'll be taking advantage of uh the last thing we'll do before finishing this first demo in the series please stay tuned for the next one is connecting to our data so the same data source that i actually have in my recent inactive section if you've been using the tool you'll be seeing data sources here that you've been using recently um i'm going to connect to the same data source but i'll create a new connection i already have an mssql and msql once i'm going to do an mssql2 first thing i'll do is i'm going to go over here and select the data provider that my data is coming from for this data source it's sql server i call this mssql2 and this is a public demo data source that you can use that word has offered so we'll connect to it mssql.windward.net and it's the northwind demo database and the credentials for this are demo demo it's a good practice to test your data connection first before we connect to it we see connection succeeded success so far and then we'll go ahead and add this data source and voila we have an active data source mssql2 connected to our template notice that before the data source is connected we have a yellow triangle here once we connect this this will change to a green go data has been connected and also we have the data bin open automatically um and i think that's where we'll leave off this tutorial please stay tuned for the next tutorial um we'll have a series of these all fairly short and manageable so you can continue with them at your pace right now the only windward functionality we've gotten used so far is our data source connection by the next tutorial we'll start using windward tags to bring dynamic data into our template along with the static formatting if you'd like to look at the start here resources before we continue on to more advanced tutorials please find those in linked in the description as well as a link to our ohana documentation page here where you can find lots of great documentation and other beginner training courses um that will dive more into specific tools for this tutorial we'll just be going over how to get from point a of an empty template to this point d or sorry not point d step skip some points in there point b um output uh with a good looking invoice sample here so stay tuned thank you