Merging Word - Access

[Frankie Deschacht]

I have a private music tuition organisation.
When I get new students, I ask them to fill in a Student form, they either
do it manually, or I e-mail them the form (in Word format, I use Office XP)
which they then mail back to me with the appropriate fields filled in.
The document has form elements in it (text fields, date fields, tick boxes).
My question is: how can I set Office XP up so that the electronically filled
in data are automatically transferred to my Access student database rather
than me having to type all the data into Access manually ?
Any help will be much appreciated.
Thank you,
Frankie.

 

[Beth Melton]

Hi Frankie,

If you are using Word form fields then you can use the "Save data only
for forms" under Tools/Options/Save option to save the form field data
in CSV file type that can be easily imported into Access.

To automate this task you could create a macro and run it for each
completed survey that:
- Turns on the "Save data..." option
- Saves document with a specific file name
- Inserts the contents of the CSV file into a master document

The master document can then be easily imported into Access. This
process could be automated as well with a macro that imports the data
and then deletes the master document contents so the first process can
be started over again.

And of course depending on your Access VBA knowledge you could
accomplish this task entirely on the Access end.

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Frankie Deschacht]

Thank you Beth,
I'll give that a go.
I must say I'm not much of an expert with Access, I was better at it with
Office 2000, still tying to get used to the XP version.

Thanks again,
Frankie.

 

[Frankie Deschacht]

One more question though Beth,
what exactly is a CSV file ?
Can't see that option when trying to save.
Thanks,
Frankie.

 

[Beth Melton]

Hi Frankie,

A CSV file type is comma separated values. After you turn on the "Save
data only for forms" option and then save the document as a text file,
the resulting file will have each field separated by commas. Note
there isn't a direct option to save in a CSV format as there is in
Excel.
--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/