Sage 100

Anyone have a way to get an editable Word doc out of the Crystal export? The Word export is all boxes, and the Word editable (rtf) is a mess. Export to PDF and open with Word 2013 does not format consistently. Is there a PDF to Word program that produces editable Word docs reliably?

What's the goal? Usually Excel is better for such exports / edits. The big problem is that CR output is not line data. It is individual field values placed on the page, which is not easily translatable into a word processor format. About the only suggestions I'd have is to try HTML as a bridge... or do what we do sometimes for fussy CSV output: create one formula field with all the output for a line.

It is price increase letters, but they want to be able to customize at least some of them for the individual customer after generating them from Sage data.

I have had the best luck with plain old Rich Text Format (RTF) save to disk and then open separately with MS Word. It even does a decent job with graphics an logos.

RTF looks good, but it puts things in boxes, which makes it difficult to move them around. Got a customer who wants to automate something but still have all the control of manually created letters...

The CR/pdf conversions are all terrible for anything other than 1-offs. Why not pull the Sage data via ODBC into a straight Word mailmerge?

PDF editing software is also an option.

@KevinMoyes I was hoping someone would have a specific recommendation, as I have tried a couple and not been happy with the results. @JerryNorman I have taken over a custom program that is broken, but I guess I may have to dig through their mess and debug it...

Phil, time to re-scope the project with the customer. ""OOB Sage functionality is for form letters. You seem to need templates for sales people to edit. I confirm this is not possible starting from Sage form letters. The approach that *will* work is also quite flexible for further gain. Let's define clearly what you need now and could benefit from this soon."" This has shifted from break/fix to full-on functionality design project. Address it head on or nobody will be happy at the end ...

@JerryNorman - Why are you still a reseller? With ideas like the above, you could be competition for Ed Kless and Ron Baker!!!

Use the Sage Office Template manager - it's the Office Button found on several Sage 100 screens. The template once generated is a Word document with full edit.

I wonder if there was some reason they hadn't already gone there? I still think it's worth using this as a reason to get the client to think deeper about it. Word docs for printing/mailing is natural, but not so much for emailing more than a couple. Should this be a mailmerged Outlook template, with option to edit as created? Will there be follow-ups, meaning some sort of to-do's either with or without CRM? How do they want the customer to respond - email, phone, web customer portal? Even if the client doesn't want to do any of this, running these possibilities by the right person (NOT the Controller!!) expands the client's awareness of what could be done, so they might ask you when something similar comes up in a meeting next month ...

And sometimes analysis leads to paralysis.

You might try PDF Converter Elite. I've used it with Excel. It has a 30 day free trial that will let you test it.

Wow, I just tried the RTF export and it was really good. I'm glad I saw this post. I have a client who needed that and Office Merge was going to be too clunky.

@AndrewCrane - PDF Converter Elite did get it right. Thanks!