How to better automate editing of fixed repeated patterns, editing and generating new similar documents?

[RZeck55]

Hello

We are trying to find ways to optimize our company office work and one of the things that seems tedious and slow to me is the fact that the person responsible for paperwork isn’t particularly advanced with their office skills and does a lot of manual labor when it comes to updating ODT/DOC/DOCX documents.

Currently they’re doing a lot of “receipt” and “order” documents where they copy an older one and edit only a few lines, doing this manually takes a lot of mouse movement and clicks … Isn’t there a better way to generate new similar documents from a template and have some kind of interface or other LibreOffice tool to enter new values in fields and then generate a new .ODT file like that?

Secondly, they’re also weekly updating a “sticker” type document where there is a standard A4 sticker paper being used and it has a fixed grid, but they’re not using a proper grid in the ODT file, they have to copy paste manually and I thouht there surely is a better way doing this by editing one of the fields and having it update for the whole grid.

While I’m the IT person, I also have little office software experience. Appreciate the help, I’ve been looking at some help files in the meantime, but I don’t know if LO has something similar to Microsoft PowerAutomate, offline version of that, other alternatives are APIs and ODFToolkit but that’s a lot of work if we would need to create our own C# or Java applications from scratch.

I can explain in more detail tomorrow with actual pictures and examples, I’ve just posted this in the evening ahead and maybe get some ideas in the meanwhile.

[robleyd]

Secondly, they’re also weekly updating a “sticker” type document where there is a standard A4 sticker paper being used and it has a fixed grid, but they’re not using a proper grid in the ODT file, they have to copy paste manually

Perhaps Creating and Printing Labels may be of some help.

[EarnestAl]

That sounds likely to be a big change for someone and some pushback is to be expected.

Receipt and order documents are probably best done through a database.

Long ago I downloaded from the extension site, an invoice template using Calc macros, it still works, and it could be adapted to orders or receipts. It is no longer listed in extensions but can still be downloaded from http://www.swierkowski-online.de/eng.html

The Writer Guide has a chapter on mail merge which might be helpful for stickers, download from English documentation | LibreOffice Documentation - LibreOffice User Guides

[ajlittoz]

Waiting for examples. My first thought would be a template file (extension .ott) with initial contents exhibiting placeholders. But if placeholder value is extracted from some other file or DB, then another workflow could be preferable.