Integrating Word into Access?

[Jim Giner]

Thought I'd post this again under a "better" subject line. Sorry if you've
already seen this.

Hello to all,
I'm new at this and am trying to find out if it's possible to incorporate a
MS Word doc into a form/report being produced by an Access application.

We have a database with records containing some identifying criteria and
locational items and a field that identifies a specific word document that
we want linked to this person. I'd like to then design a form that would
show the record for a person that displays his attributes from the Access
record along with the body of text from the Word document with all of the
Word document's formatting intact (that's why we're using word and not just
adding a memo field to the Access table).

Is this possible? And if one can do a "form", can one then do a report of
this as well? At the moment, using OLE, we have the problem of not being to
scroll thru the entire text of the word document - all we can see is what
fits into the "box" on the form with no scroll bar available. And from this
experience we do not see how we can design a report that would flow to a 2nd
or 3rd page if the Word doc was that big.

 

[Jim Giner]

Oh, never mind. We just told the user it wasn't possible with Access.

 

[Albert D.Kallal]

I would suggest that you just place a button on the form, and when it is
pressed, you launch word.

Trying to have all kinds of word information displayed in a form is going to
cause performance problems, and is also not the best approach.

Give the user some nice record editing abilities, and some nice record
searching abilities. If the user needs to view/see the word document, then
put a button on the form and simply launch/open the word document. I mean,
if you are moving around records in a quick fashion, then you can't read all
that word text anyway. Further, if you try and move around fast, you got
this HUGE drag of word trying to display some data. Further, if word hangs,
or has some problem, now you got two applications in trouble, and you are
likely to take down both ms-access and word.

Further, how much of the text do you actually expect to display in a small
window on a form? Especially since you point out that some documents might
be multi-pages in size.

Just put a button to open the word document and be done with this
problem.....

 

[Jim Giner]

Well, displaying on the form wasn't the entire problem - we did want to do a
printed report of the data items along with the contents of the Word doc.
That didn't appear to be possible either. In any event, we 're not doing it
at all now.

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

It's possible (though not particularly easy) to do pretty much what
you are trying to do using Word Automation to create a new Word
Document that contains both information from the database and the
(formatted) contents of the specified Word document. I do this sort of
thing to produce employment Contracts containing both boilerplate and
employee-specific information. It looks as if you have now abandoned
this approach. Post back with specific questions if you haven't.

Thought I'd post this again under a "better" subject line. Sorry if you've
already seen this.

Hello to all,
I'm new at this and am trying to find out if it's possible to incorporate a
MS Word doc into a form/report being produced by an Access application.

We have a database with records containing some identifying criteria and
locational items and a field that identifies a specific word document that
we want linked to this person. I'd like to then design a form that would
show the record for a person that displays his attributes from the Access
record along with the body of text from the Word document with all of the
Word document's formatting intact (that's why we're using word and not just
adding a memo field to the Access table).

Is this possible? And if one can do a "form", can one then do a report of
this as well? At the moment, using OLE, we have the problem of not being to
scroll thru the entire text of the word document - all we can see is what
fits into the "box" on the form with no scroll bar available. And from this
experience we do not see how we can design a report that would flow to a 2nd
or 3rd page if the Word doc was that big.

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