Re: Jakarta POI - HWPF for word files

[Scott Klement <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> When the user types in a name in an email or word document you enable
> them to right click the name and get a popup menu containing
> information retrieved from a server.  This is really neat in Excel
> where you can program/automate - whatever word you understand - things
> so the customer number in a cell is always validated against the as400
> database, etc

I think you misunderstood my message.  The original poster was asking 
about how to generate a Word document (i.e. a stream file in .DOC format) 
from an RPG program.

My suggestion was for the RPG program to output HTML, PDF or RTF instead 
of Word format.

I did not make any suggestions one way or the other about how these HTML, 
PDF or RTF files were to be viewed on a PC.  Indeed, my intention in 
including RTF among those choices would be for people who WANTED to view 
it in Word.

I was not trying to tell the OP which Word processing package to use, or 
which operating system to run it on, or to discuss the relative merits of 
destop operating systems.

Though, if you did want to e-mail a document from an RPG program where the 
user could key info into the e-mail message and have it validated against 
a DB2/400 database, there might be advantages to using HTML over Word. 
For internal purporses, Word might work (though it'd be much more 
difficult to output from my RPG program.)  But if I wanted to send this 
out to all business associates (customers and vendors for example) it'd be 
a real nightmare to make them all have the appropriate ODBC drivers 
installed and configured to talk to my iSeries.  By contrast, an HTML 
e-mail could just give a link to my Web site, which in turn could 
communicate seemlessly with my DB2/400 database.

But again, the thread is about outputting richly formatted documents from 
an RPG program, not about which client to use.