A bulleted list is a great way to communicate information in a concise, compelling and visually attractive way.  Bulleted lists can be used to capture and communicate all kinds of information, including…

• Key customer objectives and requirements
• A high-level definition of the proposed solution
• Site survey findings
• Implementation steps
• Scope of work elements (i.e., what’s included and not included in a solution)

SalesDoc Architect has incorporated bulleted lists for quite some time, but it has been a bit cumbersome to set up.  In the past, administrators had to set up a variable for each and every bullet point, and set up each variable to insert a line return after every bullet.

The new dynamic bulleted list functionality makes it much easier to incorporate bulleted lists that include only the bullets in a particular list that you want to include.  For example, if you have a list of 25 possible key customer objectives and requirements and a SalesDoc Architect user selects 10 of those items for a particular proposal, then only those items will be inserted into the bulleted list that appears in the Microsoft Word proposal output.

In SalesDoc Architect, bulleted lists that are pushed into Microsoft Word originate as a column of cells within an Excel-based SalesDoc Architect quote file.  A big advantage of this approach is that bullet content can be calculated using Microsoft Excel formulas.  For example, we might set up an Excel table where the SDA user can type in the quantity of certain elements that are being provided as part of a proposed solution, and the quantity is inserted within the text of the bullet content.  Here’s how it might look in Excel with some of the quantities typed in by the user…

SalesDoc Architect can even auto-calculate the quantities based on what it detects has been configured within the quote using what are called Item Categories, which can count, for example, the total number of phone sets in a configured solution (for an explanation of how Item Categories can be used, please see the Architect Manager help files or user guide).

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For quite some time, SalesDoc Architect has been able to push ranges of cells (i.e., tables) from Excel into Microsoft Word-based outputs like proposals and statements of work.  Our clients have used tables pulled from a range of cells in the Excel quote file to communicate return on investment (ROI) calculations, site locations, leasing options, managed services offerings and other information in a visually attractive way, enabling them to communicate proposed solutions more effectively and win more deals versus the competition.

What’s new this month is the ability to push “dynamic” tables that are based on ranges of cells from SDA’s Excel-based quote files into Word-based outputs.  In contrast to “fixed” tables that clients have been able to generate in the past, “dynamic” tables enable you to include only the rows that you want to include within a table that is pushed to Word.  Depending on how you set up the rows in Excel, SDA will exclude certain rows in the table that is output to Word.

For example, let’s say your company has a process that involves 10 possible implementation steps, but all of the steps don’t apply to every project.  In the SDA quote Excel file, you might set up a range of cells that looks like this…

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