Is MS Word really the best Oracle can come with for designing layouts?

Hi all,
I am returning to XMLP development after first looking at it two years ago. Back then I advised our company not to use it for all report development as MS Word didn't seem robust or flexible enough to generate report layouts.
Now I am working for a client that wants to use XMLP and am trying to develop a fairly simple tabular report but with about 5 levels of grouping. The resulting RTF template therefore has 5 levels of nested tables. Whilst all the data is coming out fine, I am finding it very hard to make the layout look anything like as within Word it is hard to select table cells, visually establish the heirachy of the tables, etc. A simple task like putting the correct borders around cells so they render correctly is very hard to get right. In addition to this I have a number of areas where erroneous white space is being displayed.
Is Oracle seriously going to continue to expect developers to use MS Word as a layout designer or are they going to develop a decent product fit for the task? I am tired of hearing from sales guys, functional consultants and Oracle blurb how easy XMLP is to develop reports in. Yes, it is if the report is simple, but try and develop a more complex layout and it is anything but simple.
Anyone got any advice or experience they can share? Are there any alternative tools on the market? A response from Oracle wouldn't go a miss to help stem my disappointment with both product and company!
Cheers,
Jon.

Hi Guys,
forgive me, that I am biased - I am responsible for the BI Publisher tool development.
First one comment regarding the nested table - The code we generate for that is the worst part of the template builder. We already have implemented a new version, which is much better - to be released after 10.1.3.4. I apologize for us not fixing that issue earlier.
Yes, the BI Publisher template builder for Word is different. Naturally it is better for some tasks and maybe weaker for some other ones. Nobody forced the E-Business Suite teams to take up BI/XML Publisher - I was PM in one of the teams so I know for sure - we all decided that we rather use BI Publisher. In our eyes it is a step forward and not 10 steps back.
I was product manager for Oracle Contracts. We tried to create a contract layout with Oracle Reports and it was not pretty. Sure If I create just some data reports all the classical reporting tools are fine (Do you really like these other tools???)
But creating contracts or more business style reports like invoices is MUCH easier with BI Publisher. With the first generation of the tools, it took my 2 hours to convert a customer contract example (in word naturally) into a production ready contract layout. Now, I could probably do it in 15 minutes.
While PL/SQL has great acceptance in the Oracle Community, it is not everyone's favorite - for example Peoplesoft, JD Edwards or Siebel developers can not use PL/SQL.
XSL has its quicks and wish it was a better language, but it is an OPEN standard.
We have migrated about 3000 Oracle reports, and all of the Peoplesoft and JD Edwards reports... I don't think it is a toy. It has the same concept as Java Server Pages and it uses Word for formatting instead of HTML.
True, knowing SQL does not help with BI Publisher reports, but user with a little SQL knowledge can do havoc to a production system. BI Publisher complete separates the responsibilities. SQL for professionals and Word for formatting. I think there are more people out there that know Word than SQL.
Embedding the XSL did not turn out all that straight forward. We are also missing one feature in the standalone, that we had in E-Business Suite and that will be included in the 11g release: Subtemplates.
Subtemplates allow you to write complicated XSL libraries that can be called from within RTF templates. For all of you who need to write complicated logic, it is much better to write the logic into an XSL stylesheet and just call out from within the Word template than coding to complicated logic into the Word document. Again my apologies for us not providing this option earlier.
People also had to learn java for Oracle applications, when they only needed to know PL/SQL before.
For all the people who don't like Microsoft Word, we are offering a web based alternative shortly after the 10.1.3.4 release. This tool may be better suited for data style reports - you will be the judge.
I appreciate your feedback and I open for any suggested improvements.
Thanks,
Klaus
Message was edited by:
KlausFabian

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