In many professions, knowledge workers use forms with special fields to be filled in—templates, in other words—to speed along their daily tasks. Legal professionals are no exception. We use templates to efficiently create documents for our clients. Bankruptcy petitions, trademark applications, copyright applications, and real estate closing documents are just a few examples of templates used by legal professionals. AppleScript can help improve the efficiency in creating and tracking these documents.
A typical template includes pre-defined fields where data from a database or spreadsheet gets inserted. For example, we might have the following greeting in a template:
Dear FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME:
With this template, we would replace the FIRST_NAME field in the template with data from our data source. We would then do the same for the LAST_NAME field. At a basic level, this resembles a merge that you might find as a feature in Word or WordPerfect. But we can use AppleScript to control all aspects of this “merge” including calculating values and making decisions depending on the values in your data source. In addition, by using AppleScript, you are not necessarily tied to one word processing vendor.
There are two ways to accomplish this task. With the first method, we can recreate the entire document from scratch every time we run our script. Our script will hold the template, use variables to replace the fields in the template, then write out the entire document to a file. The second method uses search and replace to find the template variables and change them to the proper variables.
The advantage of the first method is that the final script need not be dependent on your word processor. You can simply copy the resulting template to the clipboard and the paste it into your preferred word processor. The advantage of the second method is that you can use existing templates to the extent that they exist. In addition, if you want to change the template, you don’t have to fiddle with your script.
In the next two posts, we’ll look at each method of using templates to create documents.
Grace Suarez on June 9th, 2008 at 15:27 says:
Oh, you’re close to my personal Holy Grail! I’ve developed a number of templates in Word and Nisus, and I SO want to go to the next step that you are describing (which of course in a way takes me back to WordPerfect 5.1, but let’s not go there).
Waiting with bated breath, I am, yours truly,
Scott on July 1st, 2008 at 14:01 says:
Looking forward to the “Search & Replace” method.