MS Office and Lotus Notes

Well anyone who uses Lotus Notes will know, it's printing options suck and we are not talking minor suckiness here, we are talking Industrial Dyson on full power here. Ok maybe I am over stating the problem here, but there you go.
So Notes printing sucks, what are your options, well you can either purchase a printing add-on, at this point I will recommend Intelliprint, great printing but not as cheap as it used to be but still the best or at very least only option on the market, or you can try outputting your data into Word or Excel.
Now this is not exactly a 2 second task here I have spent a week building Excel Spreadsheet reports for some of our Sales Task Force, however the results can be brilliant and obviously take advantage of power of Word or Excel in terms of formatting and printout.
Now I could post loads of tips here and probably will do, however for now I want to post a few links to some of the articles that have got me started.

Breaking Par - 4 Part Article that contains loads of tips on MS Word Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; & one on Excel
Check out the MSDN Developer Site for Reference guides
Check out various blogs for hints and tips Jake Howlett and NSFTools spring to mind as great places to start, but many other bloggers will have posted tips that can be useful.

My First tip is going to be one that Jake touches upon in his post, create a list of variables that have the same names as those used in Excel or Word, build this into a script library and add it to your applications when you need it, it makes converting code from MSDN libraries a lot simpler when you don't have to convert all the variables they have, here are a few I have to start you off.

• Const xlEdgeTop = 8
• Const xlEdgeRight = 10
• Const xlEdgeLeft = 7
• Const xlEdgeBottom = 9
• Const xlDiagonalUp = 6
• Const xlDiagonalDown = 5
• Const xlCenter = -4108
• Const xlBottom = -4107
• Const xlLeft = -4131
• Const xlRight = -4152
• Const xlTop = -4160
• Const xlNone = -4142
• Const xlAutomatic = -4105
• Const xlContinuous = 1
• Const xlThin = 2
• Const xlMedium = -4138
• Const xlLandscape = 2

Anyway that's enough for now, I have a Word report to build, time to practice what I preach.