I'm hoping to get some suggestions from people who are doing mailings, printing letters, etc. using data from access. I've been reading up on different methods involving everything from creating the letters as access reports to full blown Office Automation which merges the data from access to a Word document.

While my VBA programming skills are somewhat limited, I need to provide something that is fairly simple for my users.

Any thoughts, suggestions, or recomendations would be greatly appreciated. I'm just looking for which direction I should pursue so I don't waste a lot of time developing something that doesn't do what we need.

Thanks;

Charles

It depends on how complicated you want the letters to be. If you're wanting lots of text formatting, the mail merge is the way to go. If it can be 'plain', then reports will work.

Noah

Thanks Noah, I know that doing this reports would be considerably easier, however, I need to ask one of my "DUHHH" type questions here. If I create the report as more or less a template, can it be opened in an edit mode so that my user can make changes without affecting the merge controls??

Thanks

If you're talking about editing the Word document, so long as the fields in the document aren't changed, the document can be altered with little trouble.

Noah

Noah;

Sorry it took so long to get back with you, and yes it looks like using Office Automation and mail merging with a Word Doc is going to be my best bet. I have to keep the end user in mind on this project and since she is already familiar with word, that's probably how I should go.

I figure I can create the appropriate bookmarks in a Word template and then let her construct the rest of the document from there.

Thanks again.

Charles

You are welcome.

I don't use bookmarks. I create a true mail merge document and link the document to the database from Word. I then open/merge/print the document with data from Access.

Noah

That definately sounds a lot easier than going through all the automation stuff. I'll have to play around with that because I am definately all about easy.

Thanks for the tip.

Charles

You can do a search for posts by me (go over any date range) with "mail merge" as the search text. I think I have posted at least one attachment with a demo on how I do it.

HTH
Noah