There are two ways of producing quotations from Eclipse, each with their own benefits and limitations. Normally, companies decide to go down one route or the other, but its possible to use both techniques, although this will involve more work in setting up.

1. Quoting from the main Print Preview menus.

Eclipse comes with two standard Quote reports: one that prints from the Job Book and includes all equipment lists on a job (Quote status and higher) with Crewing and Transport; one that prints from the Equipment List and just quote for the kit for that list. These two reports contain the backbone structure of practically everything you will need to get all the information about a job into a quote so they are the ideal starting point for users who want to produce their own versions of a quote. The quote files (name and path is display in the menu hint) will be found in your REPORTS folder on your server.

Benefits

• easier to get the output looking exactly as you want it
• can be emailed from Eclipse as PDF (or RTF) and the email and its attachment is recorded in the JobBook's Email page
• quicker to use from an operational point of view
• Multi-site users can have site specific versions of the report and menus configured accordingly

Limitations

• you only get to see a 'quoting history' for your job if reports are emailed; otherwise you are just printing a snapshot of your job in its current state
• you cannot include a Quotation Ref (e.g. Quote no.4) in the output. Only the job ref and equipment refs can be used and these are always the same no matter how many times you quote
• the output is inert, i.e. cannot be edited as you print or email, so any additional (non standard)  text you want to put in must be entered in a notes fields (e.g. Job notes) in order for the report to get this information. However, producing editable outputs in MS Word is by no means a straightforward process either and the default option for working with MS Word generates an output that is not easily edited at all (see below)

2. Quoting using MS Word launched under Eclipse's control

This technique uses Crystal's ability to export data to a temporary file that is then imported or pasted into a Word document. The quote files will be found in your TEMPLATE  folder on your server.

Benefits

• you get your quote recorded on the Documents tab of the Job Book, and can open it easy from there
• you can include a Quotation Ref (e.g. Quote no.4 or the Doc Ref used on the Document tab grid) in the output.
• depending on your print engine version the output can be edited just like any other Word document
• you can devise templates for your documents in Word (headers and footers etc) that Eclipse will use and these can even be user specific.

Limitations

• can be quite tricky to get the output looking exactly as you want it, particularly if you need the final output to be easy to edit afterwards
• cannot be emailed from Eclipse
• a little slow to use from an operational point of view
• Multi-site users can have site specific versions of the report but the menus are global so everyone gets to see all the menu options
• to a degree what you can achieve depends of the version of the print engine for Crystal Reports is installed on your PCs, and although its is often possible to install upgrades (or downgrades to the print engine to achieve your objectives, this can introduce other complications and complexities into the process.

When using this technique you have two options (subject to your print engine version -see more below):

i) High quality RTF output. This is the default option. It transfers the reporting data and layout into Word very accurately giving an impressive output. All your graphics (see THIS article for tips) can be insert directly into the report (page headers etc) and everything comes across into the Word document. The drawback is that each block of text in this document is encapsulated in a text frame, which can make the document tricky to manipulate if you need to. This may not be a problem at all if your main reason for creating word processor documents on a job is to track the history of quotes that you have done for the job.

ii) MS Word compatible format. To specify this you need to download the Configure MS Word for Eclipse utility, and run it on each machine to specify MS Word format.  The quality of the MS Word format is still quite high, although, lines and graphics do not come across, and some formatting can get slightly altered (see tips below). This is an inevitable consequence of the incompatibility between a report format, which allows almost infinite flexibility with field placement and layout, and a word processing format which requires regular line spacing. Since graphics are not carried over, you will need to devise a Word document with headers and footers for these and use the Configure MS Word for Eclipse utility to set this up on each machine. The rules for devising these Word document templates are explained in a read me file in the Configure MS Word for Eclipse zip file

Print Engine issues

The version of your Crystal Reports print engine can be determined from the Help Menu in Eclipse 2.3 onwards. The print engine is a royalty free sets of files that allow reports to be printed from applications, even though Crystal Reports itself may not be installed on a machine.

Crystal 6.x and 7.x - users should upgrade to Crystal 8.5 runtime. This is available from www.clubnavigator.co.uk.

Crystal 9x - MS Word compatible format is no longer available, although the high quality RTF output still works very well; so users who feel that they really need an editable output will need to i) downgrade to Crystal 8.5 runtime and ii) replace all their version 9 reports with the standard suite for Crystal 8.5 runtime. Please contact [email protected] for assistance in doing this.

Tips for getting the formatting right when using the MS Word compatible format.

1. The margins of your report may not be compatible with the margins of the standard Word template, Normal.dot, so you may get unpleasant text wrapping. To solve this do one of three things:

• Use Configure MS Word for Eclipse to specify your own Word template for Eclipse to use and make these margins narrow enough to accept the output from your report
• Modify your report to use narrower margins and, if necessary adjust the layout of your report.
• Modify the margins of Normal.dot, which is not something you may wish to do, just to make Eclipse outputs work for you

2.  Each section in a report has a formatting option that allows "FREE FORM PLACEMENT". This is great for Print Preview reports because if gives you complete control over field placement (subject to the grid size set for the report). However, this should be turned OFF for reports going into MS Word. Open the report and bring up the Section Formatter window ( right click on any section in the grey panel on the LEFT of the design view). Un-check "FREE FORM PLACEMENT"  for each section. You may find that after doing this sections "explode" and what was once a few lines becomes ten lines or more with fields randomly assigned to lines. Don't panic, but be patient. You will need to put everything back in its place and remove the excess lines (right click, "Delete Last Line" ).This is a little tedious, but it will reward you with a much tighter output because with "FREE FORM PLACEMENT" turned off, each section assumes regular lines, just like a word processor does.

3. Quoting with using both options (Print Preview and MS Word)

There is no reason why you can use both techniques to produce your quotes, but you cannot use a single report file to do both jobs so its a bit more work. The best option is to get your Print Preview quote completely signed off and working in a live environment, then convert a copy of it to work with MS Word using the method outlined in THIS article. Obviously, if you decide to make any changes to one report thereafter, you need to implement it in the other.