Re: To Merge or Not To Merge (a philosophical technology question)

Broadly speaking I would agree with Anne. A lot depends on
a. what documents are being produced and what needs to be done with them
b. what scale of operation your customer envisages
c. total cost of producing/maintaining any new system (including the cost
of grappling with new and unfamiliar technologies)

In Office itself, I'm not aware of any relatively easy-to-use features that
would do the sort of thing MailMerge does other than the ones you already
know. The new XML features in Office might be of interest as mechanisms for
manipulating and re-purposing data, but (a) the full features are only
available in certain versions of Office and (b) I doubt if they will help
end users in the kind of scenario you describe.

As far as Word MailMerge is concerned, it works in broadly the same way as
the Word 95 version, but there are some differences at a detailed level
a. the user interface has changed substantially
b. OLEDB connections to Access are now possible. Can be tricky if you are
using secured Access data.
c. Generally speaking, expect to do data formatting in Word merge field
switches rather than in your data source
d. there are security-related changes that can result in numerous pop-up
warnings, and which have affected the . Most can be disabled in one way or
another, e.g. via registry entries
e. there are MailMerge events which can help a programmer overcome some
types of problem

If you need to do anything that requires distribution of reports via e-mail
or in PDF format, there are various third-party products that you should
probably have a look at.

FWIW, in the larger MS-based world, if you happened to be using SQL Server,
there is a relatively new programmable reporting suite called Reporting
Services that is, if you like, the equivalent of the report generator in
Access. It doesn't sound to me as if you need to be looking at that, but
probably worth at least a glance.

Peter Jamieson

"news.microsoft.com" <stuff_at_bradc.net> wrote in message
news:%23wHup31hFHA.1460@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>I could really use some quality advice here to ensure I am not barking up
>the wrong technology tree.
>
>
>
> I have been an Access Developer for a number of years and I have become
> rather good at creating custom reports and exporting to HTML etc.,
> however, I have a customer asking me for something I have not done since
> my Office 95 days (dating myself here). Namely MAILMERGE.
>
>
>
> Currently my customer goes into the field with paper checklists and
> gathers information. They bring the paper checklists back to the office
> where the information gets manually added to a boilerplate document (or
> template), which then gets massaged into the final product.
>
>
>
> There are 2 phases to the project:
>
> In phase 1, they want an easier way to enter the data into their template.
> Instead of flipping through all of the pages a entering the information
> in scattered locations, they want to punch it all into a database and
> merge it into the document. In phase 2, they want to start taking PDA's
> out to the field to collect the data and they want to sync and merge it in
> the office.
>
>
>
> Now to my question. 10 years ago, I would have assumed this was a job for
> "Mail Merge". Today with the ever changing integration of the Office
> Suite, I am not sure what other technologies I should explore before
> assuming that Mail Merge is, and was, and ever more shall be, my best
> approach. Is there anything else I should be considering?
>
>
>
> Any advice (and especially links) would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
> Thanks in Advance,
>
> Tiffany
>
>


.

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