Suggestions for deployment

[David Sisson]

I work in a small office enviroment. Being that it's small, when
someone is absent, others sometimes have to finish reports for that
person. We run into permission problems with documents. (.doc)

In particular, I have written some code that reads information for a
floppy and inserts that data into a document with formfields. No
problems so far. The report is printed immediately and the doc is
never saved. So if it gets opened as read only, there's no problem.
In my searching of the forums, the best answer seems to be, to this is
a template, instead of a document. That's no problem. I can correct
that easily.

However, all that data is collected in another document for a monthly
report. As the infomation is pulled and inserted from the floppy, I
also insert it into a word table that is the monthly report doc file.
This one is where I have trouble. Since someone else could be
processing the report other than the original user, the macro always
stops and asks the user to change the name because Word opens it as a
read only. Since we get floppies all during the month, changing the
name could result in multiple copies and lost info. (Not all of the
employees are computer savy either in knowing the difference in
templates and documents)

My thoughts on this are to write the data to a text file, and then when
the monthly report is due, open a template and insert from the text
file. Would I have the same problem with the text file? (Or INI file)
Exporting to Excel or Access seems a bit overkill.

Are there any better solutions?

 

[zkid]

Hmm, that's a lot to think about, and I'm a little confused as to exactly
what you're trying to accomplish.

Can you place the "monthly report" document somewhere on the server where no
one would think to look for it, and then remove the read only attribute? So
then it would only be accessible through your macro when then floppy is
inserted.

If you write to a text file, you will need to work fairly hard at parsing
the data to place it in the monthly report later. Text files are just that -
text.

Can you place the

 

[David Sisson]

Ref:Office 2003
We had someone leave the office for another position. Before he left,
I suggested he copy the daily and monthly report to a folder we all
could access. So he created C:\My Documents and copied the files
there.

When we attempt to open them with Word, it places a Read Only
restriction on the file, even though the Read Only attribute IS NOT SET
in the file properites. We can't modify OR DELETE the file in any way.
We can rename it, but that kills the macro since I call it by name.

I basically had a new version in the works. I rewrote the macro to use
two templates and a text file. Works pretty good. I'm going to
distribute it today and see how it goes.

I really can't use our server to store a document (Or template for that
matter) since the server is about 150 miles (240k) away and the lag
time is 20-30 seconds per disk access. Way too slow for our use.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi David,

I think the first thing that needs to be worked out is why you're getting
the file locks. And you may find it best to pursue this in a group like
office.setup, where you'll meet a lot of people who have experience with
networks, permissions and file locking. Word shouldn't be keeping a file
lock on a file that's not opened elsewhere.

Note: I am assuming that 1. the documents haven't been saved with the
"Read-only" option set in Tools/Options/Save (or Security, if this is
Word 2003) and 2. No permission restrictions have been set on the folders
where the Word documents are saved.

I work in a small office enviroment. Being that it's small, when
someone is absent, others sometimes have to finish reports for that
person. We run into permission problems with documents. (.doc)

In particular, I have written some code that reads information for a
floppy and inserts that data into a document with formfields. No
problems so far. The report is printed immediately and the doc is
never saved. So if it gets opened as read only, there's no problem.
In my searching of the forums, the best answer seems to be, to this is
a template, instead of a document. That's no problem. I can correct
that easily.

However, all that data is collected in another document for a monthly
report. As the infomation is pulled and inserted from the floppy, I
also insert it into a word table that is the monthly report doc file.
This one is where I have trouble. Since someone else could be
processing the report other than the original user, the macro always
stops and asks the user to change the name because Word opens it as a
read only. Since we get floppies all during the month, changing the
name could result in multiple copies and lost info. (Not all of the
employees are computer savy either in knowing the difference in
templates and documents)

My thoughts on this are to write the data to a text file, and then when
the monthly report is due, open a template and insert from the text
file. Would I have the same problem with the text file? (Or INI file)
Exporting to Excel or Access seems a bit overkill.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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