Hello Ian,
I have to disagree with you on the subject of customisation. If you look at Word 2010, there is the concept of ‘styles’ and these are, like the EADocX profiles, designed to enforce some standards and ease of use when it comes to formatting.
There are, however, a few times when you do need to extend or modify a style in MS Word, and you select the text and just manually change it. MS Word then dynamically creates a new style ‘Heading 2 + Font 14pt’ – you can see the origin, and you can see the change from the standard.
Also, I would strongly suggest that you are able to pull everything from the model itself, rather than resorting to extending MS Word document properties. It should be possible to pull just the values from a particular class, ignoring the headings, format it into a table and put this in the document header. If this is done, then it’s quite easy for a lead architect or architecture manager to ensure that all document headers contain the right information, including legal statements – quite important on public sector or regulator-driven work.
Unfortunately, in many cases, if we cannot use EADocX to exactly match the format of the hand-crafted design documents (and it should be possible) then there are loads of manual steps afterwards to sort things out. This leads to lack of interest and ultimately loss of confidence in the tool.
There’s quite a high price being charged for this tool, and during my evaluation it has thrown exceptions and errored out a handful of times, which I wasn’t expecting. I was following a handwritten document and one of the EADocX exceptions also caused this MS Word session to crash too, and I then had to repair the document afterwards …
I’d like to park my review for now and not conclude things until the new version appears. It IS a lot easier to get started with document generation with EADocX than it is with Sparx RTF, but my concerns are around the customisation options – if these are not there, then we might hit a brick wall.
Regards
Joe
