Van Vugt: Jet Express for Word - Some Notes

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Those who have been working with the Word layout Reporting feature might have heard of the Word add-in called Jet Express for Word. The essence of this add-in is that "... your fields appear in clear text and the search feature makes it quick to add the fields you need", as Jet puts it on their website.

As it's freely available (so at no cost) download it and be happy with it. However I find myself using both Jet Express for Word and the Word XML Mapping pane as the have both their pros and cons. Let me list what I think as pros and cons.


Pros

XML Mapping pane

• When you have inserted a Content Control the focus will (still) be on the layout document, so when you use the arrows it will allows you to move inside the layout and not in the XML Mapping pane
• If your layout already contains content controls you can easily assign an item in the mapping pane by using the Map to Selected Content Control; love it

Jet Express for Word pane

• Adding a content control of an item in the mapping list to the layout can easily be done by double clicking on the item in the list; this is really great

Cons

XML Mapping pane

• Adding a content control of an item in the mapping list is a bit more laborious as you need to right click it and select on the context menu Insert Content Control > Plain Text; this a quite a pain in the ...

Jet Express for Word pane

• When you have inserted a Content Control the focus will not be on the layout document, so when you use the arrows it will move your 'cursor' to another entry in the Jet Express for Word pane; I find this very annoying
• There is no Map to Selected Content Control feature here
• One major annoying thing about Jet Express for Word is that the pane will always show up when open a Word layout for editing in Word; there seems to be no way of hiding it initially

I guess it's clear there is no winner here. Hopefully either Jet or Microsoft provides us with some improvements here.



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