Form input and output automation

[Mike Bailey]

I'm looking of suggestions on how to accomplish some automation for our
Marketing department.

They (we) are using Office 2003 Small Bus.

They want to have one place where they answer some questions (a form?
spread sheet?) about a specific marketing project. Then, they want to
be able to open any of several Word documents which will pull in certain
pieces of that information into that particular document.

My first thought was a Mail Merge, but the only way I know how to do it
is with a Spreadsheet with a data range. Not very "elegant" in terms of
the initial data input as they would really like something which is more
of an input form in appearance.

Thanks for any ideas,
Mike Bailey

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Mike,

I'm looking of suggestions on how to accomplish some automation for our
Marketing department.

They (we) are using Office 2003 Small Bus.

They want to have one place where they answer some questions (a form?
spread sheet?) about a specific marketing project. Then, they want to
be able to open any of several Word documents which will pull in certain
pieces of that information into that particular document.

My first thought was a Mail Merge, but the only way I know how to do it
is with a Spreadsheet with a data range. Not very "elegant" in terms of
the initial data input as they would really like something which is more
of an input form in appearance.

Basically, you connect to the data using an appropriate connection method
(OLE DB/ADO or using the JET engine, for example), query the data into a
record set, then plug the information into "target" areas in the document.
Mostly, one uses bookmarks for that. A combination of Custom Document
Properties and DocProperty fields or Document Variables and DocVariable
fields is also possible, but not as flexible for the user.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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