Great Solution for Word and Excel Users
February 27, 2019

Great Solution for Word and Excel Users

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Windward Studios

Windward Studios was being used to create custom reporting for SaaS administrators clients. Both our administrators and our clients have different reporting needs and Windward allows each user to create and modify their own report templates based on their specific requirements. Windward reduces the time required for custom report creation and modification.
  • Windward handles multiple reporting template formats using tools people are already familiar with. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are particularly useful for us.
  • Windward has great technical support. Questions and issues are always answered in a timely manner.
  • Windward has multiple pricing options which were helpful for us in getting started.
  • I would like to see more organized and up to date documentation and videos for setup and training.
  • It depends on your particular setup and requirements, but our particular setup required a separate Windows server to run the Restful Engine. A cloud-based web-service that Windward maintains would be preferred.
  • While Windward's Microsoft based tools are great, they can be a bit intimidating to non-programmers at first glance.
  • I believe developers are still helpful for modifying and creating Windward documents, but Windward helps tremendously in reducing the time required for such changes.
Windward's usability is very good for technical users. The buttons and controls are well placed within Microsoft Office and once you understand the basics, you can quickly make powerful reports. However, understanding the database schema is required and this can limit the average user's ability to make substantial edits to reports or the data that gets populated into them.
Prior to Windward, we were using an HTML to PDF conversion for our reporting solution. It required substantial development to create and modify our reports and the styling was never up to our standards. Windward has certainly helped decrease our time in developing and modifying reports and has also helped us greatly improve the styling of them as well.
Great for Technical Users. It's great for people a bit more on the technical side. It allows developers to quickly create and modify reporting templates without having to modify source code or make updates to a repository.

Potentially Difficult for Non-Technical Users. Making substantial changes to the data portions of reporting can be a bit difficult for non-technical users. While Windward's tools for this are great, it still requires an understanding of the database schema which not all users will have.