[AccessD] Ideas wanted for Office project requirements

I rebuilt a system somewhat like that a few years back for the US Bureau
of Reclamation.  They produced a report annually (well, it was SUPPOSED
to be annually) by extracting data from a mainframe dumping it into
Excel, copying and pasting into a Word doc and then (theoretically)
totalling the whole thing up and printing an 80+ page report as mandated
by statute.  You'd be better off giving the managers a run-time Access
app to enter their data, with a button to push to transmit it to a
central location.  Of course, it would be better if they simply linked
to a central back end, but I'm assuming for the moment that isn't
feasible.  Then you need a single app to import the data and
redistribute it into the appropriate tables.  Then just create the
report in Access or do a merge with Word if you want pretty formatting.

You could certainly do it using Office automation, but you would never
have the central data store at hand should a report need tweaking, and
you would have to find a way to cross-foot and validate any values month
by month.

Charlotte Foust 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Michael
Maddison
Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 6:31 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Ideas wanted for Office project requirements

 Hi all,

Slightly OT.  

I have a client who wants to automate a report writing process.

Currently they have about 30 managers who once a month send either a
Excel workbook or Word doc to some lucky person.  He/she then extracts
the contents of each file and pastes it into a Word doc to be made into
a report.

I don't do much with Office these days so maybe someone will have an
easy solution???

Step 1
My favoured idea so far is to create a Com-addin for Word/Excel that
will take selected text/objects and paste them into a blank file, the
copy the file to a file share.

Step 2 the person who collates the files has another addin that loops
through the contents of the share dir and opens and copies the contents
into fields/bookmarks(?) in a Word doc.

A 3rd component may be needed to sync the whole schmoozle.


I wonder how sturdy a process like this would be...

All responses welcome (except abuse... lol)

cheers



Michael M
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