Beginner Help with Word Project

[dianemarie]

Hello, I have a project to accomplish in Word, and very little experience with VBA, although I'm very familiar with Word. The project is simple to explain. I have many users entering data into simple Word tables (a template), about 5 columns, most of the columns are text. I need to consolidate the data into one table, which can be used for querying and tracking who's doing what. Each table has multiple rows, and can be any number of rows (usually less than 20 per table, however). I need to track the user entering data into the table via sign-on name, some header information for each table, date-time and the text data itself in the 5 columns. My questions are: Is this something I could (or should) attempt to accomplish using VBA? Or is there possibly already a tool in Word that will accomplish most of what I want? I have played around in Excel with something similar, but the users really want this in a Word environment. (I will be using this project as a self-training tool for VBA also.) If VBA is the way to go, could you point me to a beginning point, or the best resource to help me? I have a book on order for VBA Development, I am a big Help user, and I do a lot of online research. Where would I start? Thank you for taking the time to help.

 

[RobBroekhuis]

Even if the front end needs to be Word, Excel may still be the way to go for data storage and querying. It could run in the background. If it needs to be Word-based, I'm sure it could be done (building and extending a table), although multi-key searching/reporting would not be as straightforward.
Rob

 

[dianemarie]

Thank you Rob. Good lead (using Excel even if the template is in Word.) I'll take a look at that.

 

[Automaton]

Maybe the nicest way to do this is to:

1. Create the table in Excel
2. With both Excel and Word open, highlight the cells in Excel (at least 20 rows, even if they're blank) and hit CTRL + C.
3. Switch to Word on your taskbar
4. Position the cursor in Word where you want your table to appear and click EDIT/PASTE SPECIAL.
5. Click the PASTE LINK radio button
6. Select EXCEL SPREADSHEET
7. Click OK

If everything went right, you have now dynamically linked the two documents.

At 5:00 PM you go home and go on vacation for two days.
While you're gone, Martha opens the Excel table, adds a line, then closes it. Betty does the same thing a day later. On the third day, you come in and open the Word doc. Word knows that it is linked to the Excel sheet, so (if nobody's moved it) it opens as well in the background. Even though no one updated the Word file, it has all the latest info when it contacts and imports the now modified Excel file. Cool, huh?