Order Form Creator Guidance

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Steve's Order Form Creator - Guidance

As ordering goods has been centralised to Faculty level, the Faculty Purchasing office have asked us to use their Faculty Purchase Requisition Form for ordering stuff, rather than the old EEE form. Their form is an Excel spreadsheet, which needs to be filled in, printed, then signed.

I've produced a web-based "order form creator" which you can fill in, and it produces a PDF that you can print and sign. The main advantage of using the web-based system is that all past orders are centrally archived: no more conversations along the lines of, "What part do we need to order?" "I'm not sure, Dave ordered one a couple of years ago. He's left now." "Where's his order form?" "Probably on his Windows hard drive." "Where's that?" "I think we formatted it."

Personalised forms

You can personalise the order form creator. At the simplest level, enter details that will never change, such as your name, email address, and directory where your orders are archived (more on that in a bit). Make sure "Create personalised form" is set to "Yes", click "Do It" at the bottom of the form, and the form will be reloaded with all your information already filled in. Then bookmark the form in your browser.

You can also create a filled-in form for all the suppliers that you regularly use. Fill out their details (as well as your own), and create a personalised form in the same way. The title of the link is now the supplier name. Bookmark this with your browser, and you can build up a list of suppliers with their information already entered in.

Your archive directory

All PDFs that are generated using the order form creator are saved on the optics server. To tidy things up a bit, I suggest that if you decide to use the order form creator regularly, that you ask Steve Sharples, Roger Light or Matt Clark to create you a folder (in your name) where all your order forms will end up.

For instance, I have a folder named "sds" and to save the PDFs there, I add "sds/" to the front of the order form PDF name at the bottom of the form. So I don't forget to do this, when I created my personalised form, I entered "sds/" in the filename box at the bottom. Each time I use the order form creator now, the filename is already partly filled in with the right directory name and I just add the name of the PDF to the end of it, eg "sds/comar_doublets_sras_project.pdf"

Note that at present, no checks are made to see if the file already exists or not, so it's quite easy to write over a previously-created PDF. This policy may change in the future.