Microsoft Word Add-in

blogger Contacts, Interactions, Quotes

Overview

Sales Quotes reside in ASPEC, but you want to send a Quote to your customers in a PDF format.  One way to accomplish it is to pull Quote values into MS Word document and then save is as a PDF.  That document can contain your company logos, tables, legal text, images and any other content.

If your Organization does not use Quotes, you may want to quickly populate a Letter Template with the information from a Contact in ASPEC.

Manual copying of information is labour intensive and prone to errors.

We developed an Microsoft Word add-In for ASPEC that populates Microsoft Word documents with the Information from Quotes or Contacts, if it finds bookmarks that it recognizes.

Note: Contacts and Interactions use the same templates.  Quotes use a separate set of templates.

Creating templates

Your Administrator creates templates with bookmarks, using a button that helps with the creation of these bookmarks in the first place. A selected bookmark can be added anywhere in a MS Word document, where the user places the cursor.

The Administrator uploads to ASPEC a saved template with all the required bookmarks, for future use directly from  Contacts, Interactions or Sales Quotes.

Installing the Add-In

The Add-In is available with ASPEC CRM.  Contact support@salesways.com if you don’t have the installation files.

Clicking setup.exe unzips and runs the installation. When the installation is completed, users see the ASPEC tab under Add-Ins.

Fig 1: Installed ASPEC Add-In for Quotes

Users need to configure the connection to ASPEC from MS Word Add-In.  Clicking Settings loads a dialog with the url to fill, the username and the password.    Before using the Add-Ins, users should click Test Connection and wait for a green Success! confirmation.

Fig 2: Dialog for configuring a connection from MS Word to ASPEC

After a successful connection uses can use the Add-In to create new templates or populate existing ones with the information from Quotes in ASPEC.

Creating a template (by Administrator only)

When the Add-In is installed to the MS Word, users can create templates that work with ASPEC by adding bookmarks that represent the fields which will be synchronized from ASPEC  to the MS Word document. The key to a proper communication between MS Word and ASPEC is a correct bookmark name.

The bookmarks can be placed anywhere in the document by performing the following steps:

  1. Clicking “Add Bookmarks” in the ASPEC Quotes Add-in
  2. Selecting a Bookmark from the available list
  3. Clicking “Add”

Fig 3: Adding bookmarks

Button “Refresh” re-populates the list of Bookmarks in the dialog.

ASPEC Administrators can upload a saved template to the central repository in ASPEC.  This repository can be used by ASPEC users for populate a selected template with values from a Contact, Interaction or Sales Quote in ASPEC.

Fig 4: Button for uploading Quote MS Word templates

Clicking “MS Word templates” button opens a page displaying uploaded templates as well as the button for uploading new ones.

Fig 5: Button for uploading new MS Word templates and

Each template has a category and the name to help users decide which template to download from actual Sales Quotes. Template can have various layouts, content and languages.

Populating MS Word templates

When the central repository is filled with MS Word templates, users can download a selected template and replace bookmarks with the actual information from a Contact, Interaction or Sales Quote, with a click of a button.

Download a MS Word template uploaded to ASPEC by clicking “Download Template” button on the Contact, Interaction or Quote form.  The button loads a dialog with a list of MS Word templates uploaded to ASPEC.

Fig 5: Button for downloading MS Word template

Fig 6: List of available MS Word templates stored in ASPEC

As the next step, users open the downloaded MS Word template and click “Load Quote” or “Load Contact” in the ASPEC Add-In tab.

Fig 7: Load Quote dialog

“Load Quote” dialog contains the following elements:

  1. IBO # and Revision #: these values identify a Quote in ASPEC
  2. Synchronize: clicking this button populates the bookmarks with the corresponding information from ASPEC. Click it after filling out IBO# and Revision#
  3. Reset Bookmarks: values populated from ASPEC are cleared and bookmarks become visible
  4. Delete Bookmarks: current bookmark is removed from the MS Word file
  5. Cancel

“Load Contact” contains the following elements:

  1. Company and Contact: these values identify a Contact in ASPEC. Fill one of the of both
  2. Search: click to search for Contacts in ASPEC
  3. Dropdown: after Search returns the results, select one from the dropdown
  4. Synchronize: clicking this button populates the bookmarks with the Contact information from ASPEC
  5. Reset Bookmarks: values populated from ASPEC are cleared and bookmarks become visible
  6. Delete Bookmarks: current bookmark is removed from the MS Word file
  7. Cancel

Example

Before: User opened the MS Word template containing the following bookmarks:

Company: account_name_1
Primary Contact: primary_contact_first_name_1Author’s First Name: quote_author_first_name_1
Author’s Last Name: quote_author_last_name_1
Quote currency: quote_currency_1
Quote Status: quote_status_1

After:  Users clicked Load Data and filled out the IBO #, Revision # and clicked Synchronize:

Company: ABC Inc.
Primary Contact: Bob
Author’s First Name: John
Author’s Last Name: Doe
Quote currency: USD
Quote Status: Approved