How to Insert Placeholder Text in Microsoft Word for Rapid Report Generator

Why I recommend you design and create reports via MS Word template.

Creating a report from scratch using tools like iReport can be quite challenging for several reasons. Let me elaborate on why this process can be difficult:

  1. Complexity of Design: When starting from scratch, you need to design the entire report layout, including headers, footers, tables, charts, and other visual elements. This involves understanding the intricacies of report design, such as positioning elements correctly, managing spacing, and ensuring a consistent look and feel.
  2. Styling and Formatting: Customizing fonts, colors, alignment, and other formatting aspects is essential for a professional-looking report. Starting from scratch means you must handle all these details manually, which can be tedious and prone to mistakes.
  3. Dynamic Content: Reports often include dynamic content, such as calculated fields, conditional formatting, and dynamic labels. Creating these features from scratch requires a deep understanding of the reporting tool’s capabilities and syntax.
  4. Page Layout and Pagination: Managing page breaks, headers, and footers across multiple pages is crucial for long reports. Starting from scratch means handling pagination logic, ensuring consistent page numbering, and managing page breaks appropriately.
  5. Testing and Debugging: Debugging a report created from scratch can be time-consuming. You need to identify issues related to data retrieval, expressions, and layout errors. Tools like iReport provide some debugging features, but diagnosing complex issues can still be challenging.
  6. Learning Curve: Mastering the features and functionalities of reporting tools like iReport takes time. Beginners may struggle with understanding the tool’s interface, expressions, and best practices.

In this article I will introduce a simple way to create complex layout in Word and generate reports in Word format.

Simple syntax in Word template

Here we have a template with .DOCX extention name. In the template, we defined some text to replace, a image to replace, a chart and a list to substitute.

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For now we just show you how to defince placeholder text in a template. Please see the sample below:

{{name}}

A placeholder is a word, phrase, or symbol used to temporarily occupy a specific position within a sentence or a larger piece of text. It serves as a temporary stand-in until the final or intended content can be provided. For example, in a serial format, we define a string containing both alphabet and numerical characters, and then enclose it within two curly braces as a placeholder.

Placeholders help maintain the structure of sentences while allowing flexibility until the actual information is available.

For example:

  1. {{name}} is replaced with final content v_name
  2. {{total}} is replaced with final contenet v_total

Fonts, colors, alignment, and other formatting aspects is kept. Please compare the output with the template.

For example:

  1. v_name is highlighted in yellow.
  2. v_total is in bold

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Argument passed to placeholder

When we call Rapid Report to generate reports, we should pass the arguments in JSON format.

Take the previous template for example, the JSON content is similar to below:

{
  "name" : "v_name",
  "total" : "v_total",
  "list" : [ "v_list_1", "v_list_2", "v_list_3" ]
  ...
}