nisus.com

Hello
I have a question without knowing, if there exists already an answer:

I am registrating the time I work for other personen in FileMaker (time, costs, payments). Of course it would be possible, to make a layout for a billing letter with all the elemtens (total of time, costs etc.) in FileMaker.
I would prefer to use Nisus, because I have good templates for billing letters in Nisus. And its much easyer to write additional comments in Nisus.

Therefore my question: How can I force FileMaker to open a specific Nisus-Document an to put in several predefined informations at several predefined positions (for example the total of the time time and payments, that I recorded in FileMaker).
Or is this a question of FileMaker or Cocoa or AppleScript? Even if so, perhaps there is already an existing solution for that or somebody else has found a good solution.
Thanks for every input!

Peter

Hi Peter,

This should be possible in some way, likely using the NWP macro language, but how exactly will depend on your data. Perhaps we can discuss your workflow a little bit and arrive at a solution.

Let's say it's come time for you to prepare a billing letter. You switch to FileMaker and normally do what? Is there a database record that you see on screen that lists the total time, costs, etc? If FileMaker lets you copy this information, and the information always has the same structure, then it would definitely be possible to write a NWP macro that takes that information and merges it into a template document. If you shared some examples of what this compiled billing information looks like, perhaps we could help you write a macro.

Alternatively you could use NWP's mail merge feature. I assume FileMaker will let you export the desired information as a CSV text file. If you make a mail merge template in NWP that includes merge placeholders for those CSV fields, you can generate a final billing letter that way.

Let us know what you think about this, and what help you might need.

Hi Martin
Sorry that I did not continue the discussion. First of all I thank your for your answer. The problem I mentionned is still there.
But actually we have a another person that is optimizing our FileMaker solution and trying to find a way, to bring these datas into Nisus. That person knows better than me, what FileMaker can export.
Is it possible that this person, that is not a member of the Nisus-Discussion-Family, can inform you directly? If so, how could this person get in contact to you?
Thanks for helping us to find a good solution.
Peter

That's no problem. Your FileMaker person could write us directly at: