The quality of the layouts and designs is second to none. Windward's ability to help us generate templates, for which we can actually tag documents, is the key feature that we use.
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Feb 7, 2019
One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates.
Vice President of Product Management at Baker Hill Corporation
Aug 28, 2019
Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them.
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Jan 21, 2019
It's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly... they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training.
The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically.
The most valuable feature is the fact that it uses Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel as base templates, so when you generate, it's easy for clients to upgrade, and maintain, and generate out either a PDF or an actual Excel spreadsheet.
The two features that I like the best are the ability to generate Word and Excel documents, and the ability to create my templates directly inside those software sets. It's absolutely critical for me as a user to have design and layout control, because all of my reports are very, very customized. I have to have control over the ability to generate and to control what they look like.
Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 31, 2021
The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers.
Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same.
IT implementation consultant at BearingPoint Caribbean
Jan 21, 2019
Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done.
The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in.
Solutions Architect at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Feb 7, 2019
One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API.
Vice President of Product Management at Baker Hill Corporation
Aug 28, 2019
They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time.
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Jan 21, 2019
They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement.
I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems.
The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it.
There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster.
Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 31, 2021
The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.
