So we're gonna use Doxserá DB to take four different approaches to a single task. We're gonna start simple and then work our way up to astonishing.

All four examples use this Excel workbook.

It has two worksheets.

Here's a worksheet that has a list of companies, company number one, two, and three with the company name and type and so forth. Second worksheet is a list of people associated with those companies.

So here we have three people who are members of company number one, another three people who are members of company two, and another four people who are members of company three.

We've indicated who's the officers in each company, who the shareholders are, who's the directors or managers, and so forth. Just a small set of information here that we're going to work with as an example.

Now our task is to create a letter. It's going to be a notification of upcoming annual meeting. We're supposing that I'm an attorney with some corporate clients and they need to send out these notice letters once a year every time their annual meeting rolls around.

Our first approach is going to be this letter.

It has a lot of information in it, the recipient's name and address and so forth, information about the officers of the corporation signed by the secretary down here, but it really only needs to ask a couple of questions. It's going to ask for the date of the shareholders meeting. I'll say that's going to be next month.

It asks for the recipient of this letter. This letter is to our data source, our Excel workbook. So when I click the Fetch button, it reaches out into the Excel workbook and brings up a list of all the potential recipients for this letter. This is all the people in that people chart I've got.

I just choose a person, and because all of that information, exists in the database, when I click oh, well, I'll click okay here. That answers the question who I want to send it to. And when I click fill, all that information is retrieved from the database even though I didn't have to explicitly go find it myself.

So I've got Ed here with his address. I know because the database knows that Ed is a member of gadget company, so I know all of the officers of gadget company.

Here I have a pronoun that's referring not to Ed but to the president of gadget company, who is Diane.

And down here, the program knows who is the secretary, of gadget company, and so it knows who should be signing this letter. All of that derived from just a single answer here.

So already I've improved things greatly with this first approach.

I'm using my existing data that I was already maintaining anyway and limiting the amount of information that I'm going to have to input myself.

Now, the second approach, I'm going to hit reset here.

Actually, when I use this letter, I actually need to generate a whole bunch of letters. I need to generate letters to a whole lot of people all at the same time. Rather than using this letter over and over again, I'm going to use what's called the MultiDoc feature to send this letter to a whole batch of people.

So when I go to answer this question, who is the recipient, I'll click that fetch button again.

Instead of choosing a single recipient here, I can click the MultiDoc tab.

This is, just an informational screen to let me know what's about to happen.

I'll click okay. That puts in this multidog placeholder so that when I click fill now, I get to choose a bunch of people.

In this case, I want to generate letters to everyone at Widget World, so I'm gonna select those four people.

And then when I click okay, it'll proceed along and create four separate letters.

Before I do that though, let's move on to my third approach.

Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to look through this list? This list might be a thousand people long if I have a lot of, companies and each one of them has a lot of shareholders.

Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to go through this list and isolate the people who I need to send this letter to today?

Instead, using approach number three here, I'm gonna close this one, this form doesn't ask me for the name of a recipient.

Instead, it asks me for the company. Again, it asks me for a date for the shareholders meeting. I'll put in, seven fifteen sixteen.

And here, when I answer the fetch question, it's asking me for the name of a company. I click Fetch.

Here's my three companies that exist in my Excel spreadsheet.

I'm gonna choose Widget World.

Click okay.

And now when I click the fill button, it says create notice letters for whom, and I have a subset of people here. Only the people who are members of Widget World as determined by my Excel spreadsheet.

I don't have to take great care in who I'm selecting here. I can just hit the Select Everyone button. It tells me four documents will be created.

I'll click Okay.

And if you've used, Form Sets in DocsRAR, you're familiar with this screen. This is the screen that allows me to automatically save and name the documents as they're created. Since I might be creating hundreds or thousands of finished documents here, I will almost certainly want to automatically save and name them as I create them. I'm gonna save them in I've got a folder on my desktop here named results.

Let me bring it over so you can see it.

It's currently empty.

And when I click okay, we should end up with four documents here. How do I want to name the documents? I'm gonna just name the documents with the name of the person who is the recipient in this case. I'll click okay.

There's letter number one to Gary Grant, letter number two to Helen Hopper, and letter number three to Inez Iles.

Oh, and letter number four to John Jakes, four finished documents. I look in my Results folder, there they are. Each one is customized for that individual and has all that same information we saw before.

Now, our fourth approach.

This is something that I never anticipated while we were creating the program, but once it was finished and we started playing around with it, the possibilities just sort of kept unfolding for us.

Let's say I'm an attorney with a few hundred corporate clients. Let's go back to the Excel spreadsheet here for a moment.

Instead of three companies on my list here, I might have a few hundred.

Each one of those companies might have, a few dozen shareholders.

Every month, I need to generate these notice letters for maybe a couple dozen of these companies, whichever ones are having their annual meeting next month.

Next month is July.

So the two companies here in my example are Acme and Widget.

It's June right now, so I need to generate letters for the Acme company and the Widget company because those are the ones that have their meeting in July.

With my, three hundred or so companies, I might be generating a thousand letters each month. What if I treat that entire monthly process as a single task?

All of the required information already exists in my data. My data knows which companies are having meetings next month. It knows which people belong to each of those companies. It knows the officers of each of those companies, the gender of the president, and the name of the secretary.

So why do I need any human intervention at all? There are no unknowns. There are plenty of variables, but there are no unknowns.

So here's our fourth approach. Let me delete what we did before.

And here is the same letter again, but this one asks no questions. It's a form that asks no questions. It just has an instruction here, click fill to create annual meeting notice letters for next month.

I'm gonna shrink that down so we can better see what it's doing as it does it. Here's my empty results folder.

Here's my letter, which instructs me to click fill, so I will.

I click fill.

Notice that I get a subset of people here. The message says, these letters are due for next month's meeting.

It's pulled in three people tied to the Acme Corporation and four people tied to the Widget Corporation. Those are my two corporations that are having their annual meeting next month.

All I need to do is select them all and click the okay button.

I'm choosing again to save these automatically as I create them, and I'll name them with the person's name.

There's letter number one, to Alan Ames.

Alan Ames is at ACME Corporation.

Here's Betty Barnes, also at ACME Corporation, and so forth. My whole month's worth of letters.

Now all I have to do is find someone in the office who's capable of clicking three buttons in a row. I put a note in their calendar to use this form on the fifteenth of every month, and I'm done.

The repetitive, mind numbing part of my job that is so prone to human error has been offloaded onto the computer where it belongs. Computers love this stuff. They eat it up. Humans, not so much.

These letters are coming along at a three or four seconds apiece. If I had a thousand of them, it would take me a little under an hour to create all one thousand letters.