PUBLISH PARADOX 9 REPORT TO MS WORD DOC 1

[subroman]

Using the publish feature to output paradox reports to a word document. When I bring up the report in word, the spacing between fields is lost and the data fields are bunched together. Is there some sort of tab code or other code I can put in the report to eliminate this?

 

[footpad]

subroman,

There aren't any settings that I've found; however, if you don't mind creating a report specifically for the Word document, it may be possible to use a trick to get the flexibility you're looking for.

Instead of using separate field objects for your data, create a calculated field that combines the fields together and separates them with a tab or other character.

For example, here's a calculation based on the sample customer table:

[customer.Customer No] + "\t" + [customer.Name] + "\t" + [customer.Phone] + "\t" + [customer.First Contact]

Now, that's meant as one line and it looks weird when previewed in Paradox (the "\t" is shorthand for tab and Paradox displays it as a little box in the Preview window. When the report is published as a Word document, however, the \t is properly converted to a tab.

Mind you, this is pretty crude, but it does work.

You might also experiment with some other report designs to see how well they convert to Word documents. I would avoid table frames and multi-record objects, for it appears those are converted to Word tables. This makes them harder to style correctly.

I would also avoid graphics (artwork, frames, borders, and other lines), for those will create clipping problems for the conversion process.

Alternatively, you might try:

1. Publishing your report to RTF and see if that gives you cleaner results.

2. Creating a merge document in Word that uses your Paradox table as a datasource. If you're using Level 5 tables (or less), this shouldn't be a problem. If you're using Level 7 tables, use a query to create a Level 5 Answer table.

3. Purchasing Acrobat and printing your reports to PDF files.

4. Writing a custom ObjectPAL routine to create an HTML file from your datasource. I know it sounds like a bit of work, but it goes quickly and isn't as difficult as it sounds. After all, HTML is just a plain text file and the TextStream class offers several useful methods.

You can even use DDE to control Word; this can be very useful and effective.

Hope this helps...

-- Lance

 

[subroman]

Thanks Lance,


I got limited sucsess with the RTF. The best solution so far is the calculated field, though I do have to do some reformatting in word.

I have Acrobat but do not see an option to publish to a PDF format in paradox. I am not well versed in Acrobat so I will have to look into that further.