I'm sure that these exist; anyone know what they are?

[snarp]

1) Desktop-based software that basically works like Google Forms. You design a readable form for people to fill out, and the data goes into a database or spreadsheet containing all the respondents' answers.

2) Desktop-based software that does the opposite - compiles a document (DOC, ODT, PDF, whatever) based on a standard template and a bunch of entries in a spreadsheet or database. It would need to do this in large batches.

Comments

[chomiji]

You can do this with Acrobat Pro, but it requires some futzing around.

You are supposedly able to do this in the MS Office product suite too.

The second thing you mention sounds like what used to be called a "mail merge" - the classical application was that you had one word processing document that was a list of addresses formatted in some specific way and a second document that was a letter template. You ran "mail merge" to get a batch of letters, one per address, with the addresses embedded in them in the appropriate spot.

Is your office using the Microsquish product line?

[snarp]

All Office or OpenOffice, yeah. We don't have enough Office licenses for all the computers, for some reason, but we do have Acrobat; I'll look into putting that together.

And yeah, I can actually do a kind of primitive approximation of #2 by abusing mail merge, but it's very fiddly and doesn't do everything I need.

[jinian]

MS Access/any SQL database?

[(Anonymous)]

Most normal as mentioned are the MS Office products. Mail merge in Word does the list to stack of papers deal. Excel or Access can do the form to database thing...actually Word probably can too.

I'm sure OpenOffice has an equivalent, I just don't use it at work, and don't need forms outside of work.

SQL is the basis for the database query itself in most cases, which the application itself just being a way to 'code' without feeling like that's what you're doing. I use one at work that is very application specific, but the way it actually talks to the database is still SQL