Is Bubble the Right Tool for Us?

Need help
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I am a licensed attorney in California who specializes in estate planning, trust, and probate law. My team and I are busy redesigning our WordPress website with the goal of allowing paid subscribers (who are properly licensed attorneys) to create legal documents for their clients via my firm’s website. After spending years building what we thought was necessary code to accomplish this task using Word VBA and Excel VBA, we eventually realized that Word & Excel VBA don’t “play well” in the cloud. Instead, Word VBA and Excel VBA appear to be more suited to individual desktop computers.

Thus, we have spent some time learning application development programs. We’ve looked at the assets of the MS Power Platform and now are beginning to learn more about Bubble. We wish to learn enough about these various application development programs in our quest to find the right app development tool to enable us to build this process on the site that is being created for the firm.

I don’t plan to upload the application that we would create via Bubble onto an app store. Instead, I’m trying to create (with the assistance of appropriately skilled technical help) an application that would enable the user (via my website) to create the legal documents s/he needs via the “marriage” of the user’s data and the MS Word .dotx templates that I’ve drafted over almost 28 years of work as an estate planning, trust, and probate law attorney.

We’d like to build the software into the website we’re designing so that, as mentioned above, a paid subscriber with proper credentials (e.g., properly licensed attorney) can purchase a legal document (or a suite of associated legal documents) from our site, which purchase would take the user to the section of the site where the application (we hope to develop) could be accessed by the user to initiate the document creation application. Ideally, the user would enter his/her client’s data into various forms, which data would be “married” to the applicable MS Word template, which template would then be used to create a compiled and fully formatted and customized “.docx” document for the subscriber to download into his/her own system.

I wonder if, based on the foregoing information, Bubble is the right application development tool for our purposes. We do not plan to use Bubble to create games with a lot of animation or graphs. Nor do we plan to use Bubble to create an application that would have to compute complex mathematic operations or execute a machine learning (ML) model. However, the process we hope to create would use substantial amounts of data–entered by a user on our website and, depending on the data the user entered into the application, certain sections of an MS Word “.dotx” template would be “grabbed” and inserted, along with the data entered by the user, into an MS Word “.docx” document for immediate download by the user.

If Bubble is not, in your opinion, the application development tool for our needs, might you have any ideas of how we might create a proprietary application that would reside on my firm’s website and that would enable a paid, properly licensed subscriber to enter his/her client’s private and confidential data on our site (which private and confidential data would be secure from anyone, including me, my staff, and anyone else associated with the site) with the result being a fully compiled, customized MS Word “.docx” document that combines the subscriber’s private and confidential data with the applicable legal provisions from a template that I have created?

Thank you very much for any assistance any of you can provide. I am very appreciative.
James Creighton

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I think Bubble will do most of what you ask but I haven’t seen any examples or real world installations that use Bubble to actually interact with and/or directly insert data into a Word doc.

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Yes. Everything can be done on Bubble, with a little help from AirTable, some small snippets of javascript code, and .csv exports into your excel documents. The word .docx can be done with a custom built plugin.

Design wise, you’ll find it easier to build this kind of web-app with bubble than with code :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Thank you, @Wardey0513, for your response. I am very appreciative of your time. Jay Creighton

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Thank you, @dannyliu, for your response. I am very appreciative of your time. I appreciate also the extra information you provided. This is very helpful. Jay Creighton

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Hi!

There is no doubt that what you need can be created using Bubble. As mentioned, you will also need to install some plugins and make integrations with another tools using API. Nothing different than any other “average” Bubble projects needs.

Also, take a look into Documents (link here), by Form Stack. You can send data thru API and generate documents in work, excel, pdf and etc… Can be useful for your project.

Go for it! :muscle:

1 Like
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Like others have said - very doable in Bubble :slight_smile:

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I would say Bubble is the absolute best way to build something like this. Ideal use case. You’ll need a few plugins for document generation aspect of your idea, but otherwise boilerplate Bubble will be fine.

You could go the traditional development process, but you will pay so much more for an identical result.

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Hi James,

Just another voice in support of Bubble as a totally viable tool to build what you need. In fact, I built something similar to what you describe. Using pure Bubble (without plugins), data can be merged from the database into a styled text field (much like a MS Word mail merge), and then a PDF can be generated from the merged result. If using MS Word is an absolute requirement, then as others have indicated, it should still be possible - just a bit more data wrangling.

Following is a proof-of-concept which was used as the basis for both a copywriting service as well as a legal document generator built on Bubble…

Again, the above is not a full application - just an implementation of the core functionality that merges data from the DB in real time.

If you need any specialty development services once you start Bubbling, just hit me up.

-Steve

1 Like
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Steve @sudsy:

Thank you very much for your response. I’d like to contact you to discuss this project in more detail. I reviewed your Dynamic Data Merge and was intrigued by what you did.

It seems like this might work. We have created a series of forms into which the user inputs his/her information, which (in our case) resides on an Excel spreadsheet and is then “pulled” into the Word Doc or PDF file.

How can I contact you for further information? I’m new to this forum and don’t know exactly the proper method by which one user contacts another user. This is who I am, in case you need to verify I am who I say I am. Again, my website is being completely redesigned to be a dynamic site from which users will purchase the legal documents I’ve spent almost 30 years drafting for my clients.

Thank you again, Steve @sudsy. I am very appreciative.

James “Jay” Creighton

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[quote=“jamescreighton, post:4, topic:195350, full:true”]
Thank you, @rpetribu, for your response to my query. I am very appreciative. Also, thank you for the link to Form Stack. Very interesting. Thanks again. Jay Creighton

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Thank you for your response @equibodyapp. I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my inquiry. Jay Creighton :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you, @aj11. I appreciate your taking the time to offer some feedback and suggestions. Jay Creighton

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