Advice on design for specific goal.

[peterod]

Hi.

I am currently undertaking a massive project of getting our office paper free (as best we can)

I have novice experience level so please be gentle. First thing I am doing is looking at the data I need and attempting to rationalize it.

Where ai am looking for advice is the specification builder application part, and if anyone can think of a tidier way to do this.

I want to have a form where the user simply clicks a checkbox and the relevant text is inserted into a report (under the correct header.

How i thought i would do this would be to create a separate table for each specific element. then use q query to pull each checked item for the report.

Please see attached where i am at with the basic design.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

My first question is whether it has to be an Access-type report? It seems to me that you have a lot of room for things to get dicey if, for example, it is possible to have different numbers of headers in your report. The content of the report might be possible to change using Memo fields for your "boilerplate" specifications but it might be very hard for a beginner to build a dynamic report within Access.

The way I might consider doing this is different and if you are novice, it might be something you aren't ready to do. Do the follow lookups from the web (and on this forum) to see how you might manipulate an Application Object created by Word.

If you wanted to, say, create a complex section-numbering scheme in your document, it would be possible for you to use the File System Object to copy a template with all the right styles set up for you, then use the Component Object Model elements exposed by Word so that Access can insert paragraphs and headers, and can define the headers with a Style code (so you can have Header 1, Header 2, etc. objects in the document). Then you can set numbering styles and a lot of other features

I will also be honest with you. Either way, this is an ambitious undertaking that has the chance of looking really great - or of turning into the biggest nightmare you have ever seen, depending on your report formatting requirements. I would spend a bunch of time with the persons who requested this functionality to see in some detail what they might expect to see. You are doing ABSOLUTELY the right thing by looking at requirements first and exploring your possibilities, so keep up that aspect of what you are doing. So many folks would "shoot from the hip" on massive projects and end up hitting their target less than 10% of the time.