Text Control is an award-winning Visual Studio Industry Partner and leading vendor of reporting and word processing components for developers of Windows, Web and mobile applications.

Q&A: MS Word compatible reporting for the .NET Framework

Q How do developers typically use Text Control components?

A Our products help thousands of developers add mail merge and reporting functionality to their Windows Forms, WPF and ASP.NET applications. They create elegant and powerful business reports with an easy-to-use, MS Word compatible template editing interface.

Q What sets Text Control Reporting apart from other reporting vendors?

A Text Control Reporting combines the power of a reporting tool and an easy-to-use WYSIWYG word processor that is fully programmable and embeddable in .NET applications. With Text Control Reporting, users can create documents and templates using ordinary Microsoft Word skills.

Q You call Text Control Reporting "Flow Type Layout Reporting". What is it?

A Banded report designers are limited and not easy to use. Iterating over any data, in any way, across any part of the template is not possible. Using "Flow Type Layout Reporting", sub-reports for instance are integrated into the document. It is not limited to the report header, the main table and the footer. You can position all kinds of word processing elements in your templates:

  • Headers and footers
  • Text frames
  • Section breaks
  • Different page sizes and formatting
  • Nested master-detail views
  • Images, barcodes and charts

Q What is different for developers?

A Text Control Reporting is based on the powerful word processing component TX Text Control. The MS Word compatible template can be merged with a data object (business object) or database content with one line of code. At the same time, Text Control provides a powerful API to customize this merge process completely. The report generation can be fully integrated into the .NET application.

Q You announced a cross-browser HTML5-based Web editor. Tell us more.

A TX Text Control X11 will allow the creation of documents and templates using any operating system with an HTML5 capable browser including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. Because the product is being built with pure HTML5 and JavaScript, it will have a zero footprint with no client-side browser plugins required.

For more detailed information and a 30-day trial version, visit:
www.textcontrol.com/reporting/