Simple Collaborative working

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Guest

I have been asked to sort out a local school's document management problem.
At the end of the year teachers have to write reports for the pupils in their
charge. They do this by taking a single Word document, cutting and pasting a
pro-forma report sheet multiple times into this document and filling in all
their comments for the pupils in a single document. They then have to
manually merge their reports with a master document, again using cut and
paste. This is tedious, is error prone and has even given one or two of them
migraines.

I want to come up a with a simple solution, where the teacher who is in
charge of collating all the reports can give out a customised template which
the individual teachers can edit. Then the solution will simplify the
collation of reports by merging all the changes together and highlighting
clashes. They use Word 2003 and Windows XP Pro. Does anyone have any
suggestions as to how this can be achieved as simply as possible *without*
using technologies such as replicated Access databases or SharePoint?
 
If you don't want to use Access (which is what I would recommend for
this task) then Mail Merge may work.

The teachers could type their pupils information into a data file,
such as a Word table or Excel workbook, and then merge their data with
a main document. Then to create the master document all of the
individual data sources could be combined.

For information on how to set up a data source take a look at:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/CreateADataSourceContent.htm

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/
 
Thanks: the reason I don't want to use Access (just yet) is because they
need a quick and dirty solution and Access would take a lot of development
time. I'll investigate this option further.
 
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