With the mail merge component, any user can produce a formatted report based on your dedicated word templates, like a nonconformity report, an audit report, or any formatted report.
As a power user, you can prepare your own mail merge templates and start from your existing Word reports. Open the site content to access the BPA mail merge templates library and open the nonconformity report template. Simply use text form fields for columns to merge. Activate developer tools in word to access this option. The syntax is simple, name of the list colon sign internal name of the column.
Column internal names can be copied easily from BPA Settings, in the site utilities.
For child lists like related nonconformity actions, you need to put text form fields in a word table.
Images can be merged as well.
Don’t forget to add a text form field for the main list, in this case nonconformities (and hide this in your report).
In BPA master detail component, you can add a new button for end users to easily produce a mail merge report. This button should exists already with BPA apps for quality and medical. But is can be added easily on any page by selecting BPA Mail Merge in the actions menu.
In the button parameters, a wizard shows the different mail merge steps. For an ultimate user experience, it’s best to predefine all steps so end users can produce a report in one click.
As an end user, you can simply click the mail merge button to produce a formatted report, which is automatically attached to the nonconformity.
It’s now possible to automatically merge documents by using power automate workflows, like producing an audit report once an audit is completed, convert to PDF and start an approval process.
Please ask you BPA consultant for advanced options.
As a conclusion, BPA mail merge drastically simplifies report generation with no need of manual work.