Re: Generating MS Word report from Access DB

Subject: Re: Generating MS Word report from Access DB
From: Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>
To: neilson -at- windstream -dot- net
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:59:05 -0800

neilson -at- windstream -dot- net wrote:

A colleague maintains an Access database, and produces a report from it every week by copying the data from Access rows or cells into MS Word tables and paragraphs.

She has asked me if there's a way to do this by automatically gathering the Access cells into the MS Word doc. I'm sure there is. Does anyone have suggestions, pointers, or perhaps some working prototype code for such a task?

I haven't done anything like this in a long time and don't have Access/Word available to look into it, so you'll have to forgive me if this is bad advice, but I think I remember saving Access query results straight to Word format. I think a few Office format conversion options might be left out of the default installation, but check the Save As dialog to see. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you can save the query result as comma-delimited text, which Word will readily open and let you convert wholesale into a table.

Another idea--Word probably offers Online Help for this task. A lot of MS Office installations don't have the Help files installed (!) but you can install them if you have access to the Office installation media. While you're at it, install Microsoft Query--it used to be shipped with Office, AFAIK it still is. Anyway, MS Query might solve the problem of sucking data out of Access into a Word document. Also install the VBA Help files, just for fun.

You can also do a lot of fun stuff with data using VBA directly in the Word GUI. One VBA item that was around for a while and may still be is called the data control--from inside Word, you can script the control to invisibly query the database and have the results returned into Word, without ever starting Access at all.

I was the contract editor on the User Ed team for the edition of Visual Basic (3.0 Pro) that introduced the data control--I learned data programming pretty darned well in order to keep up with the author, who wanted no part of any editor who didn't know how to create a database from scratch, in ASSEMBLER. So anyway, if you want to go this route, give me a shout and I'll try to help. It isn't very hard.

-----------

Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com
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References:
Generating MS Word report from Access DB: From: neilson

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