Need current date in my newly merged document that will not update

[MurfQ]

Ok, here's what I'm trying to do. Hopefully someone with more experience in
this area can help me out. I have a table set up in Word 2003 that receives
information from an Access 2003 database. The merge is performed from a
macro/module in Access. Basically, the user selects the record they want to
use to fill in the form in Word, they hit a button and a macro runs that
sends that record to the Word template that is set up as a merge. All this
works great except for one problem that seems like it should be so simple.

The form is also supposed to contain the current date at the time that this
merge is done. This information is not coming from the database. That should
be easy but I'm having a great deal of difficulty with it. If I put the date
in as a date field in the template, it will give the correct date, but it
will be an automatically updating date, meaning when the user opens the
document on another day, it will be changed to that date instead of remaining
as the date that it was created which is what I need. I thought that an easy
way around this would be to use the createdate field in the template. Since a
new document is being created at the time of the merge, I thought that this
would give me the creation date of said new document which is exactly what I
need. Unfortunately, when I use that field, it does not preserve the field
when doing the merge, so it is no longer a field in the new document and
therefore just has the creation date from the template.

Surely I don't have to resort to programming just to put the current date
into my newly merged document without having it further update in the future
do I? There must be something simple that I'm missing? Any help would be
greatly appreciated!

 

[Peter Jamieson]

If your CREATEDATE field is in a "proper" .dot template, the .doc created
from it should have the correct creation date.

However, since you are merging from Access, a better bet would be to include
the current date as one of the fields in the record you "send" to Word
(however you are doing that), and insert that using a MERGEFIELD field jsust
the same as any other date field you might be using.

Peter Jamieson

 

[MurfQ]

It is in a proper .dot template. I thought for sure that was what it would do
as well, but for some strange reason it doesn't. I don't know if it has
anything to do with the merge being called from Access, although I can't for
the life of me figure why that would make a difference.

Anyway, I don't know why I didn't think of just adding a field to the Access
table with the current date. Can't see the forest for the trees I suppose.
I'll go do that. Thanks for your help!