need aplication suggestions

[cdhgold]

my boss needs a specilized application and I wanted to know if anyone here had any suggestions. he has a multi-part form that is normally hand written on for doing our purchase orders has about 4 copies under the top one. he wants to find some way of being able to fill out the form on the pc then having it automatically print on the forms via a dot matrix printer. the form could be reproduced in a spreadsheet probably but then trouble is in getting the printer to fill out the form. any ideas?

[caveman]

?

and ?

You create a template using office calc??
(or any spread sheet you want to use)

Fill in the required fields???

And print 4-5 copies????
Maybe use a db to store the results?????

or is there something a-miss that I don't understand?
"getting the printer to fill out the form"!?!

[cdhgold]

my bad should have been more clear on this part .. he wants to use the exisiting forms he has .. as in manully feed the exisitng form to the printer and have the application supply the data .. in other words instead of printing on blank page it would be printing on the existing pre-printed form and would need to know the correct spacing etc to fill data in in right places on form ..

[Void Main]

This should be pretty easy to accomplish and I might approach it differently depending on some variables. Like, would this be used for something like POS at branch offices where it has to be dummy proof and limited to specific functions (invoice, etc)? Do you want the data entered in the form to be stored electronically or just dumped once printed? If you need to store it I would use a database (OpenOffice is actually pretty easy to use for this now). You might want to fire up OOo (2.0 is nice) and search help for "XML Forms (XForms)". I think there are several ways you could do this and I think most of them you would want a form on the front end. Another suggestion would be to ask the same question on www.oooforum.org. I have received some very in depth help there in the past on some complex Calc sheets. If you want some more detailed help you could scan your form and upload an image of it (you could blur out key names/phone numbers etc). Also, is the printer well supported in Linux?

Heck, you could even do a web page in PHP with a MySQL backend and have a submit button that sends the job to the printer. Then you could submit the job from any machine on your network and have it print to the dot matrix printer.

[cdhgold]

Thanks for the advice. As far as usage would have to be able to be used by office manager without asking me questions so fairly dummy proof. Only used in this tech support department. I figured OOo might be the way to go this is just beyond my abilities. As far as what do with the data right now would just need it dumped after printing (is what they are doing now by hand filling in the form) but if i could dump it to database all the better. This is just beyond my skill set to do. I'll see if we have scanner I can upload a sample of the form with. Will also post this on oooforum.org. the PHP web page to mysql backend sounds like the best solution but I do not have the skill set for it.

thanks again

[Void Main]

Actually an OOo->MySQL might be the easiest for you. It would be much like Access->MSSQL.

[cdhgold]

well I have successfully managed to stay far away form access and mssql but sounds like i'm about to get my first foray into OOo and mysql.