Automation and Access to Outlook Appointments

[Guy]

Hi All,

Sorry but a relative newbie when it comes to Outlook programming.

Currently using Office 2007. From Access I create an appointment - A
Delivery or Collection Docket - in Outlook using Automation. The docket (body
of the appointment) contains information such as customer and delivery
addresses, contact details including phone number, equipment to be
delivered/collected, any special instructions and space for driver and
customer signatures.

The appointments/dockets are subsequently tracked by the van driver manager
and printed using the default memo style by our van drivers.

This all works fine, however, everything is in plain text format and looks
fairly ordinary. I would like to use fonts, tables and formatting to improve
the printed result, and reduce the size of the overall output.

Can you help?

Should I be using a custom outlook form or report? If so I would I use
automation from outlook to populate it?

Your assistance appreciated

Guy

 

[Guest]

The main question is why is are these Appointment items using the Plain Text
format? Are they being sent over the Internet (rather than Exchange) and
are being converted from HTML to Plain Text because of your Outlook
settings? Are you setting the Inspector.EditorType property to anything
other than olEditorWord (4) when you create the Appointment in Access?

If you want to change the formatting of message body text, you need to use
the Word Object Model with Outlook 2007. You can get a WordDocument object
from the Inspector.WordEditor property.

--
Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]
MCDBA, MCTS (Messaging & Collaboration, SharePoint Infrastructure, MOSS 2007
& WSS 3.0 Application Development)
Collaborative Innovations
NEW! -> Try Picture Attachments Wizard 2.0 For Microsoft Outlook <-
Web: http://www.collaborativeinnovations.ca
Blog: http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault

 

[Guy]

G'day Eric,

Thank you for your response.

The appointments are stored in a public exchange calendar. I wasn't aware
that HTML was available with appointment items. I did try to set .bodyformat
to HTML but it failed.

I also wasn't aware that I could use the word object model with outlook to
format and create text. I assume this means I could create a formatted
document with fields as place holders and then just populate the fields from
access and set the outlook body appropriately (or some similar mechanism).

Will investigate further.

Your assistance appreciated.
Guy

The main question is why is are these Appointment items using the Plain Text
format? Are they being sent over the Internet (rather than Exchange) and
are being converted from HTML to Plain Text because of your Outlook
settings? Are you setting the Inspector.EditorType property to anything
other than olEditorWord (4) when you create the Appointment in Access?

If you want to change the formatting of message body text, you need to use
the Word Object Model with Outlook 2007. You can get a WordDocument object
from the Inspector.WordEditor property.

--
Eric Legault [MVP - Outlook]
MCDBA, MCTS (Messaging & Collaboration, SharePoint Infrastructure, MOSS 2007
& WSS 3.0 Application Development)
Collaborative Innovations
NEW! -> Try Picture Attachments Wizard 2.0 For Microsoft Outlook <-
Web: http://www.collaborativeinnovations.ca
Blog: http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault

Hi All,

Sorry but a relative newbie when it comes to Outlook programming.

Currently using Office 2007. From Access I create an appointment - A
Delivery or Collection Docket - in Outlook using Automation. The docket
(body
of the appointment) contains information such as customer and delivery
addresses, contact details including phone number, equipment to be
delivered/collected, any special instructions and space for driver and
customer signatures.

The appointments/dockets are subsequently tracked by the van driver
manager
and printed using the default memo style by our van drivers.

This all works fine, however, everything is in plain text format and looks
fairly ordinary. I would like to use fonts, tables and formatting to
improve
the printed result, and reduce the size of the overall output.

Can you help?

Should I be using a custom outlook form or report? If so I would I use
automation from outlook to populate it?

Your assistance appreciated

Guy

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

The bodies of appointments are always rich-text, not HTML or even plain text. If you set the Body property, the content will appear in the font that the user has set as their default for messages.

As Eric indicated, if you want a formatted appointment body, you can use Inspector.WordEditor to return a Word.Document object, on which you can then use Word methods to manipulate the content.

 

[Guy]

Thanks Sue,

Working on this as we speak.

Guy

The bodies of appointments are always rich-text, not HTML or even plain text. If you set the Body property, the content will appear in the font that the user has set as their default for messages.

As Eric indicated, if you want a formatted appointment body, you can use Inspector.WordEditor to return a Word.Document object, on which you can then use Word methods to manipulate the content.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54