R
Ridge Kennedy
Dear All,
Working with Office 2003 on XP workstations, we are migrating to a new
membership database. In the old system we used Access as our report writer
and had quite a few "reports" that were queries that were passed along via
Access macros to Word templates. It was pretty much fully automated with
autoopen macros and works very well.
Our new database is built on MS SQL with office integration tools of some
sort built in -- but we don't have a lot of documentation on exactly how it
works.
Working with Word templates is a challenge. To create a template that works
with this system, we open a "wizard" and right click to create a document.
It acts like a standard merge document -- we can put in merge fields from
the view of data currently being accesses in a view in the DB. So it seems
at that point, the relationship between the source and the merge document is
established.
When the document is saved and closed, it can be imported into the DB
repository and it becomes a word "template" (even if it doesn't have a .dot
extension).
When opened -- the new "template" opens with merge fields visible. It is
automatically connected to a temporary CSV file (randomly generated
characters for name) that is saved in a temp directory (we can change
location of temp directory if we want to).
I've been looking at document properties and checked macro projects and
generally looked high and low to see how the DB programmers are telling the
document where to find the merge source -- how this is set up.
It would be a big time saver if we could take our existing templates and
"connect" them to the DB and import them. Lots of mergefield names to
change and so on, but better than starting from scratch for every template.
Any suggestions on where to look or ideas about what might be happening
would be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Ridge (in New Joisey)
Working with Office 2003 on XP workstations, we are migrating to a new
membership database. In the old system we used Access as our report writer
and had quite a few "reports" that were queries that were passed along via
Access macros to Word templates. It was pretty much fully automated with
autoopen macros and works very well.
Our new database is built on MS SQL with office integration tools of some
sort built in -- but we don't have a lot of documentation on exactly how it
works.
Working with Word templates is a challenge. To create a template that works
with this system, we open a "wizard" and right click to create a document.
It acts like a standard merge document -- we can put in merge fields from
the view of data currently being accesses in a view in the DB. So it seems
at that point, the relationship between the source and the merge document is
established.
When the document is saved and closed, it can be imported into the DB
repository and it becomes a word "template" (even if it doesn't have a .dot
extension).
When opened -- the new "template" opens with merge fields visible. It is
automatically connected to a temporary CSV file (randomly generated
characters for name) that is saved in a temp directory (we can change
location of temp directory if we want to).
I've been looking at document properties and checked macro projects and
generally looked high and low to see how the DB programmers are telling the
document where to find the merge source -- how this is set up.
It would be a big time saver if we could take our existing templates and
"connect" them to the DB and import them. Lots of mergefield names to
change and so on, but better than starting from scratch for every template.
Any suggestions on where to look or ideas about what might be happening
would be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Ridge (in New Joisey)