access Oracle database from Word for Mac

[Marco]

I want to access an Oracle database via some userforms I created in Office
for Mac 2004.

We use to do this via DAO or ADO when developing for Windows. Can anybody
advise me how I can best access an Oracle databse from VBA on the Mac?

thanks,
Marco

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Unfortunately I do not have an answer for you, but since no-one replied I
wonder if you managed to make any progress on this one.

On the Mac front I'm a newbie and am still very ignorant about what is and
is not feasible/straightforward etc.. As far as Word VBA is concerned, the
Mac VBA documentation discusses calling Mac "Code resources" as the
equivalent of calling routines in Windows .dll s, but I get the impression
that that option was only available in Mac Classic, not Mac OSX. Maybe
someone can confirm/deny.

I also hoped it might be possible to connect to an ODBC mailmerge data
source and manipulate data using the (limited) facilities of the
MailMerge.Datasource object, but none of the Word data connection dialogs
suggest that there is any support for such connections any more (although I
think I found sometthing in Help that suggested they might be) and my
attempts to make them using OpenDataSource have failed so far. Maybe someone
can confirm/deny whether that is feasible or not. (FWIW I have Office 2004
here but would be interested in any relevant info. on other Mac versions).

If neither of those is feasible, and an Applescript approach is also
infeasible, the only other approach I can think of would be to access your
Oracle data by Automating Excel, which /can/ access ODBC data sources via MS
Query - assuming, of course, that you have installed the necessary ODBC
stuff & Oracle drivers on the system.

I have to assume that anyone in the Mac environment who needs to do this
kind of thing basically chooses a completely different approach from
Word+Automation.

Peter Jamieson

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Marco:

See if this will work for you:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/actualodbcdriverfororacle.html

Cheers

I want to access an Oracle database via some userforms I created in Office
for Mac 2004.

We use to do this via DAO or ADO when developing for Windows. Can anybody
advise me how I can best access an Oracle databse from VBA on the Mac?

thanks,
Marco

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Marco]

I tried using that ODBC driver before. Word 2004 simply does not have the
features to use ODBC as mailmerge datasource.

Peter,

I came to the same conclusion: automating Excel.
Since the Office environment on Apple is not very stable, I have my doubts
about automating applications and exchanging data.

I don't think this will work as you'd expect it to work. I talked to some
specialists and they told me that there were 2 good alternatives to access
these databases:

1. Realbasic
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/06/14/realbasic/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

This seems a perfect solution, but you'll have to pay for this one.

2. use JAVA applications and JDBC to access the Oracle database and open the
correct template to supply it with the necessary data from the DB or use a
temp-datafile that you can pick up with your VBA code

gr. Marco

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for getting back - it was very useful to have some confirmation of my
own findings to date.

Peter Jamieson

 

[google]

I also hoped it might be possible to connect to an ODBC mailmerge data
source and manipulate data using the (limited) facilities of the
MailMerge.Datasource object, but none of the Word data connection dialogs
suggest that there is any support for such connections any more (although I
think I found sometthing in Help that suggested they might be) and my
attempts to make them using OpenDataSource have failed so far. Maybe someone
can confirm/deny whether that is feasible or not. (FWIW I have Office 2004
here but would be interested in any relevant info. on other Mac versions).

MS Word for OS X does not support ODBC, although MS Excel does. We
have several customers who use Excel to query Oracle for data, save the
resulting spreadsheet, and then use Word to mail merge with the
spreadsheet. While not as convenient accessing the database directly
from Word, using Excel as an intermediary usually isn't too bad. This
process can be automated, especially with the Excel "QueryTables" VBA
object.

Jonathan Monroe
Actual Technologies - ODBC for OS X
http://www.actualtechnologies.com
(e-mail address removed)