At my last job, I built a tool to produce standard documents from our green-screen system that held the client data. The users of the green-screen system would

At my last job, I built a tool to produce standard documents from our green-screen system that held the client data. The users of the green-screen system would tell it to print a document by picking which template to use from a menu. The system would generate an XML file in a directory that was shared out via Samba. A VB6 program watched that directory for these XML files to appear, when one appeared it would figure out what the relevant template was, use COM automation to tell MS Word to load the template, fill in the template fields, save it to that client's folder on the file server, then print (on the user's selected printer in the green-screen system) two copies (one for the paper file, one to mail) and an envelope. There were a bunch of weird word processing practices that made it slightly worse than it already sounds. Each letter that was sent out was actually made of a letterhead (one for each location we operated) and a body with the standard text for various letters we sent. The body would sometimes contain links to other documents (e.g., forms we were requesting someone to fill out), the program would follow these links and print those documents too, but only one copy as we didn't need a bunch of blank forms on the paper file. There was also an Access database used by this VB6 program to maintain various bits of configuration data - mappings of document codes to filenames, mappings of green-screen printer names to Windows printer names, etc. Access gets a bad rap, but it made maintaining that configuration data a breeze. It was horrific, but it saved everyone an incredible amount of time.