Can you make reports that can be fillable by others?

[hrseebeck]

I have a form and a report that list a company name from the database but needs to have additional fields completed by that customer. We want to be able to have the form or report fillable electronically so that they can complete it and return it electronically. Is there any way that this can be done with Access? Are there any suggestions?

Thank you,
Heather

 

[boblarson]

I have a form and a report that list a company name from the database but needs to have additional fields completed by that customer. We want to be able to have the form or report fillable electronically so that they can complete it and return it electronically. Is there any way that this can be done with Access?

If you are using Access 2010 and Outlook 2010 you can create a special email in Access which can send info from the database and the user can modify or add missing information and then email it back to you (provided they do so following the instructions it sends with it) and then Outlook can process the emails and put the data back into the database automatically. But, the form it creates is not all that pretty and you can't modify it to suit yourself.

Other than that, well - no.

 

[Beetle]

With a bit of VBA programming you could get close to this type of functionality by using Excel for your "form". Create the form in Excel and lock all the cells except the ones you want them to fill out. Export the customer data you need (like CustomerID, CustomerName, Address, etc.) and then e-mail them the spreadsheet. When they send it back just store the excel file in a predetermined folder. Since you know exactly which cells the data you want will be in, you can use VBA to open the Excel file to grab that data and write it back to your table. One of the cells in the spreadsheet would contain the CustomerID (or whatever your PK value is) so you can write the data to the correct row. For more on working with Excel via VBA code see Bob's website.