Email Report as PDF

[Guest]

I would like to click a button and have a report attached to an email message
in a PDF format. I have the PDF writer installed on my workstations, but
when I choose the Send Object action in a macro I do not have PDF as an
available format.

Any ideas?

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

Unfortunately, it's not as easy as that! Access does not natively
support output as PDF, nor does it natively interface with PDF printer
drivers in any helpful way. If you use Adobe's unbelievably expensive
Acrobat package, I believe that you get an API which will allow a VBA
program to talk to the driver and specify where you want "printed"
output to go. There are also Access add-ins which offer the same sort
of capability and range in price from relatively cheap (possibly
free?) to quite expensive - look in the archives of this Newsgroup.
You will certanily have to do some VBA (rather than macro) programming
to make this work.

I would like to click a button and have a report attached to an email message
in a PDF format. I have the PDF writer installed on my workstations, but
when I choose the Send Object action in a macro I do not have PDF as an
available format.

Any ideas?

Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher

 

[SA]

First you normally need a PDF printer driver. The "free" ones like cute pdf
you can't control so you can't automate output. However, with some very
modestly inexpensive drivers like Win2PDF (www.daneprairie.com) or Zeon's
DocuCom PDF Printer (www.pdfwizard.com) you can automate them. Our PDF and
Mail Library works with both these drivers and allows you to automate output
of a PDF file from an Access report and then e-mail using outlook or outlook
express (notes and GW as well). You'll find our PDF and Mail Library for
Access in the Developer Tools section of our web.

You might also look at www.lebans.com where Stephen Lebans also as a PDF
creation solution.