Word 2003: XML Templates

[Jerad Rose]

What is the best way to do mail merge type operations with Word 2003? I was
hoping that the XML capabilities allowed you to easily "send" XML data to a
Word document, and it merge the data with the XML tagged Word document. It
appears this isn't possible (or at least, not very easy) in Word 2003.

Here's our scenario. We have one master template that will be merged with a
company-level template, both of which will have "tagged" (XML?) elements
throughout to be replaced later with employee-level and company-level data.
Our master template will be fairly static -- maybe updated once every month
or so. We will receive company-level templates on the hour, which will fire
off the process to be merged with the master template. After merging the
two, we will then process all of the employee-level data (5 to 500
employees, for example) and merge the data with the newly merged templates,
and print out the results into a booklet.

I realize there are about a million and one ways to accomplish this. But
since Office 2003 is brand new (not even released yet), I haven't been able
to find very good support documentation on the various methods used to
accomplish this.

I'm aware of Word's XML capabilities, but the more I read about them, the
more it seems this may not be the best way to go. Of course, there's the
old-school method of mail merge, but this seems to be becoming an outdated
method. I've also read a little about "Smart Tags", but from what little
I've read, this seems to be more useful for creating interactive documents
rather than automating document building.

Please help point me in the right (or another) direction. If you could even
point me to some good resources to help me learn more about these various
features, that would be appreciated. I've searched google groups, MSDN,
Microsoft support online, and the documentation included w/ Office 2003, all
of which haven't given me a clear direction yet. We're pretty desperate
here, as we're quickly approaching a deadline that is looking more and more
unlikely.

If this (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement) is not the appropriate news
group for this question, please let me know a more appropriate news group.

Thanks so much in advance for your help.

Jerad

 

[Jerad Rose]

Thank you Cindy for your response.

I saw your responses in the other two groups, and I do appologize for the
cross-posting. Typically I would never do this, but considering our
desparate situation and the fact that there is no "assigned" news group for
these topics, I needed to make an exception if it would expidite getting an
answer.

I was afraid that this was something not yet fully (or at least, easily)
supported by Word 2003. We sort of jumped the gun on Office 2003 for this
project when we heard the word "XML", thinking it would be the perfect
solution to our situation. And it still may be our best bet, but I don't
think it's going to be quite as easy as we had hoped.

I am going to look into both mail merge and XSL transforming as a solution.
I will post on this (and the other two news groups) my solution, whatever we
end up doing.

Thanks again for your response and suggestions!

Jerad

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In future, when you want to post the same question to several NGs, you can
accomplish this without censure by "cross-posting," putting several NG names
in the header of a single post. This guarantees that readers will see your
post in any of the listed NGs (but only in the first one they read), and
that you will see all the collected answers in any one of the NGs you
revisit. The objection to multi-posting (or duplicate posting) is that often
readers waste time answering a question that has already been adequately
dealt with in another NG.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
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