How many of us sometimes wish that we can print the words on a cheque instead of handwriting them. It would look more professional and not to mention a lot neater! This feature is normally available to some special bank clients with a piece of software and a special cheque book which can be fed onto a dot-matrix printer.
Most of us don't have the privilege to this piece of software and surely not the special cheque books but hey! I should be able to do that using Excel and Words right? We thought that it would be quite a straightforward thing to do until you actually try them for yourself.
There are a number of obstacles you need to overcome. The first being trying to come up with the right cheque size and more importantly trying to fit the details onto the right places. After a lot of blood and sweat, I manage to create a template where it would print nicely onto a standard piece of Malaysian Cheque.
The other obstacle is trying to figure out whether you can auto convert a number into words. Of course you can always manually spell ***One Thousand Two Hundred Thirty Four and Fifty Six Sen Only*** but wouldn't it be a lot cooler if you need to just input the number 1234.56 and it will automatically convert that into words!
After some research, I manage to get it to work using MS Excel.
Basically all you need to do is to populate an Excel Spreadsheet with the respective details such as the date, payee and amount. It will then be used to print onto the cheque.
As a bonus, wouldn't it be great if you can save the list of cheques you have printed instead of overwriting them. I'm sure that some auditor or accountant somewhere would appreciate this transaction list in order to reconcile with the GL.
All you need to do is to mailmerge this Excel with the Word Template. You can then pick and choose which record number to print out and keep adding to the list for as long as you want.
You can download these files from
here, extract the files onto your own hard drive and try for your self. Start populating your list in Excel and use the Word document to print the cheques. You may need to tweak the document data source the first time you use this since it may still be pointing to my local drive.
The other thing for those using latest version of Excel, you may need to allow macros to run. Don't worry the macro in this Excel file is safe and comes from Microsoft themselves. It is required to autoconvert number into words.
If you are not familiar with mail merge or can't get the file to work, please let me know. I will try to assist you as much as I can.
Good luck and have fun with this!!
