Message for Duane Hookom

[Noel]

Hi Duane, I sent a post earlier today to the Access
General Questions newsgroup (copied below) and then, while
searching through old posts, found one of yours which
might help me. I cannot see the original post but your
reply said something like “Word does allow you to group
records together using special codes” and suggests using
Help for more info. I have searched through Word Help
(Word 97) and cannot find anything relating to this. Does
your earlier reply relate to my question and if so, can
help me find the information I need please? Thanks, Noel

Hi, I had a long discussion about this before on this
Newsgroup and the outcome was that Access cannot do what I
want. This has continued to bug me – perhaps I did not
explain myself too well, so here is another try. I simply
want to set up a Mail Merge based on a query that selects
a number of records from One-to-Many related tables. I
want the Merged document to reflect this relationship. To
give a simple example, say the Query selects a number of
Customer order related records. One field is the Customer
name, the other is the items ordered. Some customers will
order only one item but many will order more than one.
When I set up the Mail Merge on this query, I get one
document per ordered item. So if a customer orders ten
items (ten records produced by the query) then I get ten
Mail Merged documents, each with the same customer name
and each with a different ordered item. What I want is
just one Merged Document per Customer, showing all of the
items ordered by that customer. This seems such a simple
thing – surely Access can do this? Is there something I
need to do in the Query or in the Mail Merged document?
Thanks, Noel

 

[Sal Rosario]

I am not too sure about Word and Access handling this, but let me tell you
that we do that all the time using Access reports with subreports. Why
exactly do you need Word when you can do it all in Access?

Sal
www.ctgtraining.com

 

[Noel]

Thanks for this Sal. Yes I actually have already set up
letters using Access Reports but this gives me some
problems. Each letter has a Name and address at the top,
within its own group, then I have a name field in the
Detail section. There can be any number of names, so the
detail section can grow. I have also inserted two Word
objects - one in the name group section and one in the
name group footer section. (so the top one says something
like, "Dear XXX, the following people have been allocated
to you:" Then comes the list of names, then the main body
of the letter). The users then go into these Word text
objects to alter dates etc. This all works fine until one
of the letters gets big in terms of text. If the lower
text object is large and the number of names in the detail
section exceeds, say, four, then the whole text object
plops over to the next page, leaving a large blank at the
bottom of the first page. The people I am doing this for
had an older database that used MailMerge to do this - so
their expectation is that this wonderful Access product
must be able to do at least the same. Anyhoo, Duane has
replied to my copy of this post in the Queries section of
this newsgroup and I need time to understand his reply. I
would appreciate any further help you can offer, however.
Can you think of a way to modify my design so that my
letters can spill over to two pages a bit more elegantly?
Are there any examples anywhere for me to see? Thanks
again, Noel