Where is the best place to transfer documents?

Question

Automation

I work in an electrical laboratory, from the workflow that I constantly have, these are technical reports, which, in fact, consist of the same type of protocols of the established form. Now the preparation of those. reporting is done in Word. Due to the fact that in the protocols of one technical report, there are a lot of the same type of repetitive data. There is an idea to transfer all this to Excel. Let's make one sheet of input data that automatically appears in the rest of the protocols. How practical is this, or are there better programs for this?

Answer 1

There is an idea to transfer all this to Excel.

Good idea.

Or is there a better program for this?

There is, for sure. But they will have disadvantages compared to Excel:

• you need to look for them, then test them, discard the unsuitable, look again, waste time; Excel is obvious and predictable;
  
• perhaps they would have to be bought (even if Excel is not bought, it can be much more difficult to find a cure for highly specialized solutions);
  
• such programs will not be on every computer, and situations are different (an urgent need to open a report on a computer that does not have such a program); Excel is available on most PCs (except Linux, and there is also a partially compatible Libreoffice);
  
• they are sharpened for a narrow scope; a step aside (changes in work, new requirements) - and such a program ceases to meet the requirements, and a new version is promised in a year; Excel is universal and there are always a lot of people ready to suggest.
  

Of course, I will name an alternative, but don't laugh.
Hire a 1C programmer to write a solution exactly for your tasks. You can do it much more conveniently than in Excel, but it will cost money. Perhaps this will make sense if the amount of workflow is large.

Answer 2

automation and Excel are incompatible
common SQL database, FastReport and .NET client solved all problems in our case