Report requirement

[petermeachem]

Currently we use a Word merge to create a contract document running to up to 10 pages. The vast majority of the text is fixed with just a small amount of names and whatnot from the database.

This seems to give us an overly large amount of grief. Sometimes it just fails, sometimes Word moves text to a new page for no apparent reason. This can be serious if the text moved is a signature for instance.

I'm not sure that an Access report is the best way to tackle this as there seems to be a low limit on the amount of text in a label or text box and I would end up with lots of labels which would quite likely refuse to line up nicely.

Does anyone have any good ideas of how I can accomplish this?

The contract ends up as a pdf that gets maield out to teh customer if that is of any help.

 

[KenReay]

Hi

Difficult ro advise without having seen the document. But You could use memo fileds to hold the text (this would give you 64kb instead of the 255 limit on txt fields. Use of Can Grow property would allow the txt boxes to assume the required size, and use of Align in the format menu during report design should allow for the accurate alignment of text boxes and labels.

All in all it does not appear to be such an enormous amout of work, why not just try it and see how it compares with the Word Mailmerge version?

One downside, I would expect Word to be far supperior for formating (ie mixing font size, bold, etc in the text)

Regards

Ken Reay
Freelance Solutions Developer
Boldon Information Systems Ltd
Website needs upgrading, but for now -

http://www.kenneth.reay.btinternet.co.uk

UK

 

[petermeachem]

I'll give it a go. The word document pages are tightly crammed, like most contracts and the formatting might be a pain too, it's all numbered and inset lists. Making text changes which is bound to happen from time to time might be awkward. A web page would be another possibility but browser printing is not the best.

 

[rosieb]

I've done something which sounds similar, and I found a report was by far the easiest route. You'll probably have to mess around with the formatting for the variable data, but unless it's utterly unpredictable, it's a much easier solution.

Rosie
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." Richard Feynman

 

[JoeAtWork]

Making text changes which is bound to happen from time to time might be awkward.

What you might want to do is create a table that has memo fields holding the text. Then you could create a simple form bound to that table with large textboxes for editing. Or you could do the editing in a word processor, then copy and paste in the field.

It would probably be easier than editing a label on the form.