Place Access database into Word with styles?

[J.J. Feminella]

I have an Access (2003) database with several tables. In one of these tables
(let's call it "Books"), each row refers to a book. Fields include Title,
Author, ISBN, CopyrightDate, Description, and so on.

I also have a large Microsoft Word (2003) document containing documentation
(let's call it "Reference") about a software product. I'd like to place the
data from the Books table into the Reference document, but I want the
benefit of the Word styles defined in the document so that I can customize
the look of the exported info by using a Word style. For instance, let's
suppose that Books looks like this in comma-delimited form:

"Harry Potter",J.K. Rowling,56789,2004,"The charming tale of a heroic young
wizard."
"Who Moved My Cheese?",Joe Smith,12345,2002,"An insightful book about
avoiding mousetraps."
"Science Made E-Z",Bob Crackpot,45678,2001,"Now even complete idiots can
learn advanced calculus!"

In the Reference document, the information for the first field might appear
as follows:

Harry Potter
[By] J.K. Rowling, (c) 2004.
[ISBN] 56789
The charming tale of a heroic young wizard.

The text of the first line might be in, say, bold, the second in italics,
and the "By" and "ISBN" text has been added in the Reference version to
clarify the meaning of the numbers.

There are number of ways that I see how this could be done, but I don't know
the steps to do it, and this is where I'm looking for help. I'm not even
sure if it *could* actually be done any other way except manually. This
would be bad, since "Books" is a table that's over 300 rows. How could I go
about doing this in Access, if it's possible?

Any help at all is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

It'll be difficult to do in Access. An Access text box doesn't allow you to
mix bold, italic and plain text. You'll have to use an RTF control (such as
the free one Stephen Lebans has at http://www.lebans.com ), and you'll have
to learn all about how to format RTF.

You may actually be better off just storing the data in Access, and doing a
mail merge in Word to get the formatting.

 

[John Nurick]

Hi JJ,

You can do this sort of thing with Word's "mailmerge" feature. Merge it
as a catalog (i.e. multiple records per page), and format each merge
field the way you need it.

For more information see http://word.mvps.org

I have an Access (2003) database with several tables. In one of these tables
(let's call it "Books"), each row refers to a book. Fields include Title,
Author, ISBN, CopyrightDate, Description, and so on.

I also have a large Microsoft Word (2003) document containing documentation
(let's call it "Reference") about a software product. I'd like to place the
data from the Books table into the Reference document, but I want the
benefit of the Word styles defined in the document so that I can customize
the look of the exported info by using a Word style. For instance, let's
suppose that Books looks like this in comma-delimited form:

"Harry Potter",J.K. Rowling,56789,2004,"The charming tale of a heroic young
wizard."
"Who Moved My Cheese?",Joe Smith,12345,2002,"An insightful book about
avoiding mousetraps."
"Science Made E-Z",Bob Crackpot,45678,2001,"Now even complete idiots can
learn advanced calculus!"

In the Reference document, the information for the first field might appear
as follows:

Harry Potter
[By] J.K. Rowling, (c) 2004.
[ISBN] 56789
The charming tale of a heroic young wizard.

The text of the first line might be in, say, bold, the second in italics,
and the "By" and "ISBN" text has been added in the Reference version to
clarify the meaning of the numbers.

There are number of ways that I see how this could be done, but I don't know
the steps to do it, and this is where I'm looking for help. I'm not even
sure if it *could* actually be done any other way except manually. This
would be bad, since "Books" is a table that's over 300 rows. How could I go
about doing this in Access, if it's possible?

Any help at all is greatly appreciated. Thanks!