can access do this?

[Guest]

I have a lot of documents that go out to new employees. There are a core set
of documents that go to all employees. However, depending on what type of
employee I have, (union, non-union, CA employee, WA employee, etc . . .) they
will or won't get other documents.

Is there a way to set up an access database, enter in certain information on
the new employee, and only the documents I want associated with that type of
employee would print?

Also, if I type the employees name in can it be populated throughout all of
the documents (like a mail merge)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Lemark23]

Access can do this, however I would recomend that you get someone who
knows their way around VBA to get it done.

Your documents will probably need to use VBA object Automation to make
your documents correctly.
You will probably need to generate the queries that define who gets
what from code.
To get this to work at the push of a button, you will probably need to
automate your mail client through code as well.

You probably have all of this information in some other database, so I
would recomend starting this project by linking Access to that
information and just processing the information in Access, not editing
the employee information.

Access is very good at this however, and VBA can do lots of great stuff
with documents and you can get this to work no matter what the email
client is.

 

[pietlinden]

I have a lot of documents that go out to new employees. There are a core set
of documents that go to all employees. However, depending on what type of
employee I have, (union, non-union, CA employee, WA employee, etc . . .) they
will or won't get other documents.

Is there a way to set up an access database, enter in certain information on
the new employee, and only the documents I want associated with that type of
employee would print?

Also, if I type the employees name in can it be populated throughout all of
the documents (like a mail merge)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I don't think you really need VBA for this... (although it wouldn't
hurt!) You might want to grab Albert Kallal's WordMerge stuff from his
website, because it encapsulates a lot of this stuff for you, so you
wouldn't even have to understand how the innards worked.

not so with the queries (unless someone builds them for you).


Table structure/relationships

tblDocument(DocumentID, FriendlyName,UNCPathToFile,
CoreDoc(yes/no),...) alias D

tblEmployee(EmployeeID, Firstname..., EmployeeTypeID...) alias E

tblEmployeeTypes(EmployeeTypeID, EmployeeType) alias ET

tblMailings(DocumentID,EmployeeID,ReceiptDate) alias M

tblTypeReceivesMailing(EmployeeType,MailingType) alias TRM

for CoreDocs:

SELECT D.FriendlyName, E.EmployeeID, E.FirstName, E.LastName...
FROM Employee As E, Document As D;

this creates a cross-product (all docs times all employees), then you
can filter for which ones you want.

for types of employees receiving types of docs

SELECT D.FriendlyName, E.EmployeeID, E.FirstName, E.LastName...
FROM Employee As E, Document As D
WHERE E.Type="sometype"
AND D.DocType="SomeDocType";

Yes, I know.... there are several fields here that have bad field names
etc... It's an outline, not real code.

To answer your question:
you could create a series of tables to store the data and then query to
get the set of "who gets what document" and then send those results to
various mailmerge templates using Albert's code. Wouldn't be that
hard, I don't think. Might require a bit of code, but as for feasible?
yes. absolutely. For a total beginner, probably not.

 

[John Vinson]

I have a lot of documents that go out to new employees. There are a core set
of documents that go to all employees. However, depending on what type of
employee I have, (union, non-union, CA employee, WA employee, etc . . .) they
will or won't get other documents.

Is there a way to set up an access database, enter in certain information on
the new employee, and only the documents I want associated with that type of
employee would print?

Certainly. You'll need (at least) five tables: Employees, Positions
(employee types), Documents, PositionDocuments (the documents required
for an employee in a particular position), and EmployeeDocuments
(which documents the employee actually received).

Also, if I type the employees name in can it be populated throughout all of
the documents (like a mail merge)?

Yes. You'll be able to use either Word MailMerge or VBA code to
actually open Word and print or save the document.


John W. Vinson[MVP]