Producing documents from a database

[hals_left]

Hi,

I Seem to going round in circles with a document production problem.

I need to create both single docs and batches of docs using data sets
from SQL server. The clients are remote and have Office 2K and XP. Most
the docs exists in word already as the business

Word is great for designing the templates and the
familiarity/learnability is good for users with the File->New->Invoice
type of scanarios etc.

Mailmerge is a good tool for batches of docs but limited for dealing
with parent/child recordsets and formatting multiple rows and
connecting to SQL Views etc with different versions of MS office.

VBA is good for the latter, late bound database connections are good
for different versions but doesnt naturally support multiple docs and
is slow for creating large docs and medium-large batches and leaving
the VBA in the finished items is a big problem.

Maybe Word/VBA is the wrong application for this ?

Crystal reports is not great either, users need to learn a new app
altogether, extra costs and the templates cannot be modified easily.

SQL Reporting services is also not ideal, needs a webserver running and
..NET installed, new user interface for users to learn , limited
controls for getting multiple query parameters from the user etc, no
way to create as word docs, pdf docs cannot be edited after production.

So whats the solution?
Any one out bthere solving this kind of problem using word?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi Hals_left,

If we were talking Word 2003 the answer would be obvious:
WordProcessingML.

For earlier versions of Word, you could produce RTF or Word's "native"
HTML (round-trip HTML) if you need the full Word functionality. If all
you're really interested in is a nice-looking document that doesn't
require all the Word "extras", normal HTML would do.

Or, do a combination. Create the basic text and tables as HTML, open it
in Word, and apply the final formatting ("finish") using VBA.

I need to create both single docs and batches of docs using data sets
from SQL server. The clients are remote and have Office 2K and XP. Most
the docs exists in word already as the business

Word is great for designing the templates and the
familiarity/learnability is good for users with the File->New->Invoice
type of scanarios etc.

Mailmerge is a good tool for batches of docs but limited for dealing
with parent/child recordsets and formatting multiple rows and
connecting to SQL Views etc with different versions of MS office.

VBA is good for the latter, late bound database connections are good
for different versions but doesnt naturally support multiple docs and
is slow for creating large docs and medium-large batches and leaving
the VBA in the finished items is a big problem.

Maybe Word/VBA is the wrong application for this ?

Crystal reports is not great either, users need to learn a new app
altogether, extra costs and the templates cannot be modified easily.

SQL Reporting services is also not ideal, needs a webserver running and
..NET installed, new user interface for users to learn , limited
controls for getting multiple query parameters from the user etc, no
way to create as word docs, pdf docs cannot be edited after production.

So whats the solution?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[hals_left]

Thanks Cindy,

A few areas I can pursue there.

I' not sure that HTML/CSS can give me robust page breaks and
positioning of footers etc but your final suggestion might be a
workaround.