Creating variable length tables

OL Connect Professional Designer
1

Hi, new to PlanetPress Connect here, upgrading from PlanetPress 7, slowly learning the advantages & workings of the new software.

We receive in Excel data that generates a variable table in a word merge document. It comes in as 1 row per table, with 80+ fields (as columns) for the values. Template from client has these fields in a word document with headers for each row keyed in, but our client wishes to suppress the entire row (including header) if the values for that row are all zero.

Currently we go through the spreadsheet, filter on each row, remove zero values (where both are zero), and add a new field for the header for those values and use the clients word document replacing the keyed in elements with fields so that the merge suppresses the blanks. This is saved to a big PDF, split and renamed via another process and used as a dynamic image in another merge process in PP7.

Phew! Is there any way I can streamline this process with Planet Press Connect Designer? It’s very time intensive preparing the data due to the manual work.

So for example:

Header 1 123.00 0.00
Header 2 0.00 0.00
Header 3 0.00 123.00

needs to result in:

Header 1 123.00 0.00
Header 3 0.00 123.00

2

Do you have 1 row per document or multiple ones?

3

If you have 1 row per document (record) then you could use the Skip Record option of Connect which will skip the current record when that Action Step is selected (usually from within a Condition). Basically you would look for zeros in both fields and when it is true, the true branch would have the *Action step to skip the record.

If you have multiple row per record, basically same idea but instead of skipping the record, you skip the field extraction, hence that row isn’t extracted.