Lotus Notes Form Page Border

Question

I have been asked to create a Lotus Notes form that looks exactly like a document created in MS Word. Most of it has been pretty straightforward, however, I am not having any luck adding a page border to the document.

We're on Lotus Notes 8.52 and the form will only be viewed internally, and only through the Notes client, so no need to worry about other mail clients or web access.

What I have tried: 1) I created an image and used it as the background on the form. It looked awful on the screen and would not print. 2) I created a stylesheet (css) with the page border defined. However, this caused every part of the document to have its own border, not the whole page.

I've checked the archives here as well as notes.net, and I guess I am on the only person either not clever enough to figure it out on my own or to talk my users out of it.

Answer 1

I've hit this issue before as well - HR had some pre-printed reports and they wanted the same format to be displayed via Lotus Notes. After alot (and I do mean alot) of messing around I came to the conclusion that this was a bad idea. The option I went for was to capture the data in Lotus Notes but display it in MS Word - as a read only document. So the users entered their data (this was Personal Development Plans, Personal Career Review, Role Profiling, 360 feedback etc) via Notes but there was a button View/Print (just simple script) which created an instance of word based on the HR template and populated bookmarks in Word with data from Notes. The MS document attributes were set to read-only to prevent users from thinking they could also enter data directly into the word document. They were happy enough!

Word of caution though - if you have any assistive technology (AT) users their readers will struggle to interpret a read only Word document. Hit this issue with Pre-sentence reports so it's worth bearing in mind. Also, Word would have to be a core application at the company.

All the best

Phil