Access and Word Documents

S

Steve

Help,

Trying to tie in an Access Database that will monitor Word Documents that
are created, updated, etc., that are in a shared file (window explorer)
area.......
 
G

Graham R Seach

Steve,

I don't quite understand what it is that you want to do. What do you mean
when you say you want to "monitor" Word documents? If while "monitoring",
some event occurs, do you want to do something?

Regards,
Graham R Seach
Microsoft Access MVP
Sydney, Australia
 
S

Steve

Graham,

We do a lot of Word documents in our office. I would like to create a
database to where we can search for a document by title, also to track how
many documents are created, revised, etc. within a month by multiple users
(they are saved within a shared document folder), and even the total amount
of pages for each document.

Steve
 
S

Steve

Graham,

Gotta go for now. What i am trying to really state is that my office
primarly types dictations, so I am trying to create a database that can
actually create a word document with template add ins and then track this
document at a later date and if there are any revisions made to it. Also to
be able to track how many documents are created from each user within a
month, quarter, year, etc. And also determine pages typed within the
document and for the user. Some of our user's are counseled per se on the
amount of pages done in a month......

Will be looking forward to any response you may have.

Note: I did find a database for document management, but was very simple
and would only list the documents you had in the files and you could open
them from there, but too simple for what I am looking to create or
find.....Thanx
 
G

Graham R Seach

Steve,

Firstly, I'm not convinced that Access is the right tool for the job.
Certainly you can do the business logic in Access, but unless you store the
documents in the database, there's no way to prevent users from creating,
editing and deleting documents outside of Access's control (and thus without
its knowledge). Commercial Document Management Systems usually store the
documents in their own database, and prevent users from accessing documents
via external means (using the check-out/check-in mechanism). It's pretty
hard to do that with Access without running into some fairly major problems,
not the least of which is the filesize limit. I'd recommend using SQL Server
for the data store.

Secondly, I'm not sure how you'd go about "monitoring" disk folders, except
to periodically poll them (and all the documents in them).

As for retrieving information about documents, you can use the
Application.FileSearch object for that, and I suppose you could store some
statistical information in the data store. You can of course, use automation
to control Word from Access if that's of interest to you. If you would like
specific information about how to use Application.FileSearch or automation,
just let us know, but I think you first need to think a bit more about what
you really want to do.

Regards,
Graham R Seach
Microsoft Access MVP
Sydney, Australia
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