[moron4hire]

What does this do for me that the MS Word template that comes installed with Office does not?

EDIT: I'm serious. I can think of several reasons why I would not want to use this, ranging from "I don't want to have to remember a specific URL for this one purpose" all the way up to "I don't want to be sending my invoice data over an unsecured connection to some random statup-of-the-month."

[wikwocket]

I would say over MS Word, this offers:

- Discoverability: when I was working on my invoice template, I looked all over the web, and found a bunch of garbage, before I eventually hand-crafted something in Excel

- Ease of use: Word templates can be annoying to fill out and format right, and they won't do the math for you. Excel will, but good luck getting it to print right every time, and heaven help you if you need more than one page.

- Fun: When was the last time you filled out a Word template and thought, wow, that was kind of cool!

[archivator]

For future reference, you can insert Excel tables (the type that do math) into your Word document. The magic of COM!

[danpat]

Depending on how anal you are, and how complex your invoices are, one good reason to use a tool over a Word template is simply adding the numbers up properly.

I joined a small business that was doing them in Word. After reviewing the last 12 month of invoices (about 200), I found about 5% of them had simple math errors, i.e. the Total did not match the sum of the line items.

Sure, you can get it right by hand, but why bother when using software can eliminate the adding-up step entirely?

[davidjgraph]

On the second stage there's a link to the generated PDF, you could download that and send, instead of having them do it for you.

[moron4hire]

If they've generated a PDF, then they had to have you post the info to their server to run the PDF generator.

I'm a little concerned about whether or not you know this and just forgot for this simple example, or don't know this about how web apps work. You should just assume that any web app you're using is collecting your data, even if you don't "save" or setup an account.

EDIT: I assume this because I have written ones that maximally collect data, so I just assume others have done the same.

[davidjgraph]

On draw.io we produce PDFs of diagrams both client and server side. It's not at all hard to do it client-side. The point you really wanted to make was that a server would be required to echo the PDF back to the user.