Formal Letters with Data Elements 1

[alr0]

Hi All,

I need to produce professional looking merged letters that are driven by and display data from tables. Some of this is simply conditional formatting but the more complex part is displaying certain records in a one-to-many table that are flagged with a descriptive paragraph.

Access reports are great but they are not for formatting business letters.

Word works for the formatting and conditional printing like, if MyField=0 do nothing, if MyField=1 print the paragraph. It is difficult to display the many side data in anything but a table and connecting to more than one table is very tedious.

This is a growing part of our work that I would like to do with finer control and make some templates that less skilled employees could handle under many circumstances.

Anyone know of any products, tools, techniques that would at least be a move in the right direction.

Thanks,

alr

_____________________________________
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding out what we expected.

Henry David Thoreau

 

[lameid]

You can embed Word objects in Access reports... In this way you could have static Word formatted information and dynamic Access information like the many side of your reporting.

Also instead of just mailmerges Word supports something like a field that can be owerritten... I think it is called a bookmark (I saw someone else use them over 7 years ago). Anyway the jist of it was you could replace bookmark text in Word documents. He was doing something kind of like a merge but much more dynamic.

Hopefully one or a combination of those ideas will help you out.

 

[alr0]

I never thought about importing formatted components from Word. I have never used bookmarks but I will look into this.

Thanks,

alr

_____________________________________
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding out what we expected.

Henry David Thoreau