how to write text with reference fields

**livelymind** · 03-23-2013, 02:18 PM

Hi,

Is there a way to make text documents in Excel with a Word-like layout?

I now make my offers and invoices in Excel, because of it's calculating power and my contracts in Word, because they contain a lot of text (about 10 pages)
It would be so much easier to make all those 3 documents in the same excel sheet, and use reference fields to automate the content.
The difference in the contracts are customer data, prices, dates, ... and all those are written in a typical text layout.

Can this be done?

thanks
Joachim

**Richard Buttrey** · 03-23-2013, 02:24 PM

Hi,

Yes of course. It's essentially a design and formatting task, and there's no reason why Excel can't be made to look like any Word document you may have.

And of course if the text you want to show doesn't need to vary you can just add a Text Box or Auto Shape to hold the text in question rather than having the text embedded in a cell. Even if the text does vary you can still use Text boxes or other shapes. It's just more complex since you'll need to write macros to update them based on changing variables.

**livelymind** · 03-24-2013, 07:00 AM

What a quick reply!
I think I'll just puzzle a bit with textboxes for the invariable parts and use the "&" function to combine cell values with other pieces of text.

Thanks Richard