This
project was inspired by a newsgroup question about automatically
incrementing invoice numbers, and began with a
major re-edit of my web page
on that topic. I then took one of Microsoft's standard invoice templates
and decided to add a user interface.
It very
quickly became apparent that Word is not the ideal vehicle for creating
an invoice template. Access and especially Excel would have made things simpler, but
once I got my teeth into the project, it became an obsession and took a
couple of weeks of polishing and refining until I produced the template
associated with this page.
At some
point during the process, I involved my good friend
Greg Maxey, and it became
something of an obsession for him too, and before long we were swapping
files daily - and it was he who incorporated the use of an item pick
list, to which I added the means to create the list, which he refined
... and so it went on, until after very many hours of work we got to the
point that we think we have ironed all the wrinkles, and made it as idiot
proof as possible, whilst still making it worth using ... we hope!
It is
important to mention that Greg
and I live on opposite sides of the world, so we each worked while the
other slept, but the requirements of creating a template that was
equally at home on either side of the Atlantic, meant that we were
forever changing each other's date formats, spelling (the footer
inconveniently includes the word cheques/checks) and page layout between
A4 and US Letter. Not only that, but the coloured panels in the
header/footer were misaligned with the table, when the page size
changed.
This became
a pain to deal with and so I introduced code to determine where the user
was working and setup the form accordingly.
The initial
release for public consumption is numbered version 4. There have in fact been rather more
than four versions, but only at suitable milestones did the version
numbers become changed. In fact we started renumbering from zero when
Greg became involved.
