URL as datasource

[Philip Ruelle]

Hi,

Does anyone know if it is possible 'out-of-the-box' to use a URL as the
data source for a mail merge or whether there are any plans to support
this? I'd have thought with the backing that MS are giving web services
this is one of the first things they'd have put into Office 2007.

I've tried it in Word 2002/XP, 2003 and 2007 Beta 2 but it appears that
the datasource either has to be local or FTP (at least that option is
available in 2007 beta 2). It seems bizarre to me that HTML was
designed as a web page description language and yet you can't access it
via the very protocol that HTML was written to be used on. Surely it
must be me doing something wrong....

Thanks,
Phil

 

[Peter Jamieson]

I will check again on Word 2007b2 but for earlier versions of Word the
general rule is that
a. you can't open file-type data sources (.doc etc.) on URLs.
b. Word always has to access an "object" (in the broadest sense of the
word) accessible via Windows networking to open a data source. That object
may be the data file itself (.doc, .htm, .mdb, .xls, an MS query file (.dqy
I think), an ODBC machine DSN, a data link file (.udl) or an Office Data
Connection file (.odc), even when it's opening a "client-server" type
database that's locatable using an IP address.

There's no logical reason why either (a) or (b) /have/ to be that way. They
just are, as far as I can tell. Further, there's no logical reason why you
couldn't actually comply with (b) and still open a .mdb at a URL, but the
Jet OLEDB provider doesn't appear to support it. (I tried again, a few days
ago, just to be sure, but of course there may well be some simple approach I
haven't tried).

FWIW as far as .mdb s are concerned, Access won't open them on HTTP URLs
(perhaps not on RTF URLs either), so it's no surprise that OLEDB won't do
it. But Excel will open workbooks at URLs - it's just that the OLEDB
provider won't, or at least not when it's invoked from Word. I cannot help
feeling that modifying the OLEDB provider to do it wold be fairly
straightforward and that MS had either a technical or commercial for not
doing so, or not allowing other file data sources to be opened on URLs. I
don't know why they haven't changed those things, but in all probability the
reason is either "it wasn't a priority" or "the security implications are
unknown"

So...

Surely it
must be me doing something wrong....

....no, I don't think so...

But as I say, I haven't re-checked on 2007.

Peter Jamieson