by Jack Ozzie

Level: Beginner Works with: Notes 4.5 Updated: 27-Jan-97

Domino/Notes 4.5 ActiveDocuments expand on the visual or in-place editing functionality provided through OLE 2.0 by enabling Notes users to not only use a word processor or spreadsheet in place of the Notes editor, but to use the full user interface and functionality of these applications, rather than a subset. This benefits you in several ways:

• Rather than merely providing a mail-oriented interface as do many competitive products, Domino/Notes 4.5 expands your user interface choices to include virtually any ActiveDocument Server application (check www.Microsoft.com for a list of ActiveDocument apps)
• You can work with full-page documents and perform all of the functions normally available to your application
• If you use Microsoft Office 95, the Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Lotus Wordpro 95, you can have Notes 4.5, you can use ActiveDocuments right now (to download Notes 4.5 for a free trial, return to Download on Notes.net!)
• Notes becomes an even more useful home environment because, while the Domino 4.5 server handles workflow and document management, security, etc., you save time and eliminate redundancies, because your desktop products are a more seamlessly integrated component of Notes.

Sample ActiveDocuments template
Download ActiveDocuments sample template (1.34MB)

In this sample template, we used Microsoft Office Applications and the Notes Personal Journal Database. The Personal Journal is designed to keep private Notes documents not intended to be shared with others. It may be used as a diary, a lab notebook, or as in this case, as a holding place to compose documents before they are ready for wider distribution.

The Notes 4.5 ActiveDocuments template enables you to use three types of ActiveDocuments within the Notes 4.5 framework. These are:

• Documents, to create a Microsoft Word document
• Worksheets, to create a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• Drawing, to create a bitmap image with Paintbrush

How to use the ActiveDocuments Template
You create one of the three types of documents by clicking on New Worksheet, New document, or New Drawing. You will see the full user interface of the selected Office application.

Provided that you do have Microsoft Office 95, Notes will launch the appropriate application and list it in the Notes “All Documents” view.

The Action buttons just above your newly created document include Done, Done and File, and Doc Info. They will let you save and file the document into a specified folder, and examine and set the document properties.

Your Microsoft Office documents can then be easily organized via the Notes "All" view. Note that as you get more and more documents in your journal, you can create folders to organize the documents. Create a folder by choosing "Folder" in the create menu or you can create one "on the fly" by choosing the Done And File button in the document when you are ready to put the document away. You can also drag and drop between folders as desired.

The "All Documents" view shows all documents that have been created in your personal journal. You can click on the Title column heading to sort alphabetically by title and then click again to restore the View to its original state. Similarly, you can click on the date column to see your documents in the descending order in which you created them. This allows you to easily find the most recent documents you've edited. Please check "Special features worth exploring" in the demo template for more on using Notes 4.5 ActiveDocuments.

A Word of Caution
As with any pre-ship product, we recommend that you use caution by backing up your databases before running this demo. Because Notes 4.5 ActiveDocuments is a demo template, we have not invested a lot of time in testing it as we do with shipping products; therefore, you should expect bugs in the software.

Copyright 1997 Iris Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.