What if someone doesn't have MS Access?

[swedeace]

I'm doing some research for one of our instructors in regards to one of her
distance learning students. Supposedly, this student does not have MS Access
and is trying to do mail merge to get their assignment done. What file
extension does the mail merge database appear like in Word to someone who
doesn't have MS Access? Thanks.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP on news.microsoft.com]

If the student is using a recent version of Word (Definitely this is the
case for Word 2007 and maybe it started with XP/2002) and is creating the
data source via the Mail Merge utility, then the data source will have an
..mdb extension. The data source can be created separately from the Mail
Merge utility as either a table in a Word document or as an Excel
spreadsheet.

See the article "Creating a Mail Merge Data Source" at:

http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateADataSource.htm

A Directory type mail merge can be used to convert a data source to a table
in a Word document. To do this, attach the data source to a Directory type
mail merge main document and in that document, insert a one row table with
as many columns as there are fields in the data source and insert a
mergefield into each of those cells. When that merge is executed to a new
document, that document will contain a table with a row of data for each
record in the data source. A row can then be inserted at the top of the
table and into the cells of that row, the names of the fields from the data
source can be inserted. After saving that document, it can be used as a
data source.


--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[Peter Jamieson]

To confirm Doug's message, Access/Jet .mdb format is the standard from
Word 2002 onwards (on Windows, that is).

However, for Word to use a .mdb as a data source, the student does not
necessarily need Access on their system.

At this point it gets a bit technical.

At the very least, what they need is something called the MDAC and the
Jet database engine. One or both of these may be installed as standard
as part of Windows XP and/or Vista, but are probably still available as
downloads from Microsoft.

If they need to connect to the database using DDE (e.g. if they need to
connect to a parameter query in Access), then they will need Access
itself. So any course needs to be designed so that it does not use
queries that require DDE to be used - e.g. avoid
a. parameter queries
b. queries that use wildcards, e.g. "WHERE something LIKE '*'"
c. queries that use user-defined Access VBA functions
d. queries that use linked tables
e. queries that use financial series functions, the VBA function
replace, and perhaps some others.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk