Storing and Querying MS Word Docs in a mdb

[Guest]

I have a number of reports on stores in MS Word. Can I store these reports
in mdb and query them? Can you do that through a web site. I use FrontPage
2003.

 

[John Nurick]

I have a number of reports on stores in MS Word. Can I store these reports
in mdb and query them? Can you do that through a web site. I use FrontPage
2003.

Only with great difficulty. It's far better to extract the data from the
documents and store it in a proper relational database structure -
though extracting the data will be a challenging programming task in
itself unless the documents are 100% uniformly structured.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply, John. I should back up a bit. The reports are
entered through a web form and captured in mdb. i have been merging the
reports to Word and then posting the reports on a web site. is there a way i
can call up reports say for all reports for store # x or by region, etc. via
some sort of data access page through the web site?

 

[John Nurick]

I have zero experience of web programming, so can't help with the
details. But the way I'd do it would be to store the Word documents
(maybe after converting them to HTML or PDF) in a folder or folders on
the server. In the database, I'd just have a table structure along these
lines:

tblReports
ReportID
FileName
Fields storing the period the report covers

tblStores (probably you already have this)
StoreNumber
other fields

tblRegions
RegionID
other fields

tblReportsRegions (which reports refer to which regions)
ReportID
RegionID

tblReportsStore (which reports refer to which stores)
ReportID
StoreNumber

....or maybe
tblStoresRegions (which stores are in which regions)

A structure like this will support a user interface that lets users
specify the regions, stores and dates they're interested in, and then
generates links to the relevant reports.