Drawloop Blog

We are proud and excited to introduce the beta release of LOOP Exchange. LOOP Exchange is a simple yet revolutionary way for you to web-enable Microsoft® Office® documents for file sharing.

Register today for LOOP Exchange, it’s free! If you are already part of our LOOP community, you can login to LOOP Exchange with your LOOP email and password to begin building and deploying Dynamic Document Packages (DDPs) for sharing.

LOOP Exchange is an industry first as it lets anyone create, build and deploy web-based solutions with the same Microsoft Office files that people have used for years. Since LOOP Exchange is built on a simple and proven technology, no programming experience is needed to create and deploy Dynamic Document Packages. Our LOOP community will be able to easily and safely share all of their hard work and intellectual capital without exposing their documents, formulas or secrets. LOOP Exchange brings web-based solutions to anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

What makes LOOP Exchange different?
Unlike other file sharing services where files are posted for sharing in their original format, LOOP Exchange goes beyond just sharing. We allow you to share your document or set of documents as a web-based solution protecting your original files and delivering dynamic output to the user. LOOP Exchange converts the files into a web-based solution to capture inputs on a web form and dynamically create output as a single PDF. The original files remain secure and untouched.

Since LOOP Exchange is part of LOOP, it also leverages our document packaging technology, which makes it easy to add other file types to your DDP, including any PDF, JPG, HTML, XML, Text, BMP, GIF, PNG, Publisher and Visio files, and deliver all of them as single PDF.

What is a Dynamic Document Package (DDP)?
A DDP is a document or group of documents consisting of Microsoft Excel, Word and/or PowerPoint files used to create web-based solutions. All of this is done without exposing any of the formulas or other confidential information from your original files.

To learn more, click here. We look forward to seeing you on the LOOP Exchange!

Since Excel range names are necessary to use Excel with our document creation services, we thought it would be a good idea to let other people “in” on our range name secrets. For LOOPlus, one of our products on Salesforce AppExchange, range names are used to map Salesforce fields into an Excel file for Dynamic Document Packages^TM. In our soon to be released LOOP Exchange platform, range names map from fields on a web form to an Excel file then possibly to a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint file. As you can see, Excel range names are an important part of our lives.

Excel tries to make it easy to create and delete range names and modify which cells a range name refers to, but what if you need to do more than that? Jan Karel Pieterse (in collaboration with Decision Models, UK) developed a great range name tool called Name Manager 4.0 that shows you a list of range names which you can filter by scope, names containing text, hidden names, 2-d multi-area names, and much more. This tool has the standard range name functions, add, delete, edit the ‘refers to’ formula, as well as some handy and necessary functions like editing the actual range name (which also gives you the option to edit the range name in all formulas that reference that name).

Watch now

You can download Name Manager 4.0 here.