Need a Software to create a Contract

[Youkai]

Hi there, I have a Question.
In the Company I work they are using Excel sheets for Contracts right now including Text areas which they have to resize every time including changing printing area and so on ... this is bad !
We need something which can (if possible) create a Proper printable version itselves and if possible it should be auditable.

I tried Libre Office Writer which can create Forms and save it as PDF but there we have the Problem that if the Writable area is to small the Text is cut off and if we make it extra big and there is only one line of text it looks like shit so we need something that changes size withouth people having to format the whole thing every time.


The thing is build like

LOTS OF TEXT
LOTS OF TEXT
Some excel lines with calculations
LOTS OF TEXT
Questions like "how risky is it to take this company as a customer"
Text area where our ppl need to write as detailed as possible
Questions
Text Area
LOTS OF TEXT
....



When the text is to big for one of the text areas we need to reformat the whole thing each time or reduce font size which also looks bad in a contract plus it is possible that if someone forgets to change printing area the text will be cut in half or you have the headline on one page and the rest on the other while it would be better to stay together...

I was thinking of using a simple Forms programm like google forms but with the calculations and stuff it isn't really that good plus these programms are all online forms and we want/need offline documents.

 

[FAST6191]

The big boy accountants and legal types I have knocked around with often have big boy software to make such things that they pay handsomely for, and then pay even more to someone with the rare and hard to come by skills to sort it again when the original dev can't be bothered and goes bankrupt. If I am doing things for me I have LaTex (or more likely I am going to be lazy and use Lyx) but not everybody gets on with that, though I mainly do reports, proposals and analysis rather than contracts and aesthetics do come in there.

"and if we make it extra big and there is only one line of text it looks like shit"
I don't know that I have ever seen that be a problem for people. One tends not to read contracts for their aesthetic quality* as much as being able to wave them in front of a judge one day when someone takes the piss. Indeed many legal types will seek to get things down to as unchanging a contract as possible just to avoid someone creating a surprise somewhere and have it be more of a process than something anybody is invested in. Possible option if the existing system is sort of working is why not have three versions of the thing with small, medium and large prefabbed section.
Even if you did have a resizing box would it not lead to someone doing some formatting anyway to avoid having the header for the next section maybe appear on the next line as you say?
If your contract doubles as a proposal or bid then I could see something happen but that is not something most do for anything more complicated than real world computer shop, car repair or something similar where it is just a person bringing one or two items in to be fixed.

*indeed any aesthetics probably go out of the window when you put end of line, this intentionally page left blank (protip here is change the basic text for the text box to say that and if someone enters anything into it then it will lose that and spare you some embarrassment somewhere down the line) and whatever else in there just so nobody can claim something got lost and they did not know it was there, or indeed for your own peace of mind to make sure nothing got stuck in a printer somewhere.

Possible option 2. Redo the layout so you have maybe a summary sheet for executives needing a costing and not much else, and then all the variable length stuff at the end where it can be as big or small as you like.

 

[Youkai]

"and if we make it extra big and there is only one line of text it looks like shit"
I don't know that I have ever seen that be a problem for people. One tends not to read contracts for their aesthetic quality* as much as being able to wave them in front of a judge one day when someone takes the piss. Indeed many legal types will seek to get things down to as unchanging a contract as possible just to avoid someone creating a surprise somewhere and have it be more of a process than something anybody is invested in. Possible option if the existing system is sort of working is why not have three versions of the thing with small, medium and large prefabbed section.
Even if you did have a resizing box would it not lead to someone doing some formatting anyway to avoid having the header for the next section maybe appear on the next line as you say?
If your contract doubles as a proposal or bid then I could see something happen but that is not something most do for anything more complicated than real world computer shop, car repair or something similar where it is just a person bringing one or two items in to be fixed.

*indeed any aesthetics probably go out of the window when you put end of line, this intentionally page left blank (protip here is change the basic text for the text box to say that and if someone enters anything into it then it will lose that and spare you some embarrassment somewhere down the line) and whatever else in there just so nobody can claim something got lost and they did not know it was there, or indeed for your own peace of mind to make sure nothing got stuck in a printer somewhere.

This is pretty much 1:1 what I told the people who want me to give them the "perfect" solution but no different versions are bad because they say they don't know in advance how much space they need (duh -.-V) and enough space ... yeah I also told them "make the text area big and or limit the ammount of signs you can write" but then again they didn't accept this.

Well we are some kind of Bank so we have rather complicated and big contracts.

Guess we will probably really need some expensive programmers as I assumed it, at least if they can't accept anything which is not "perfect"

Thanks