Best way to create a directory: Word mail merge vs Access reports?

[Etxezarreta]

Hello everyone,
I need to create some directories off several ERP extractions.
As far as I can remember, I can use the mail merging system of Word (using labels), but an Access report would be very easy to generate as well.
What I am not sure about is wether I can insert some titles or subtitles with the "word way".
I would be more than happy to have your opinion or feedback on this matter.
Many thanks!
Etxe.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Exte, may I suggest that you look into the Office "FileSystemObject" (yes, the words are run together for lookup purposes.) FSO has the ability to make directories.

FileSystemObject object

Office VBA reference topic

docs.microsoft.com

CreateFolder method (Visual Basic for Applications)

Office VBA reference topic

docs.microsoft.com

You would use this in VBA because I don't know that you can reliably create a directory implicitly by creating something to be IN that directory. The keyword here is "reliably" and the VBA method would be most reliable when compared to any other method.

 

[Etxezarreta]

Exte, may I suggest that you look into the Office "FileSystemObject" (yes, the words are run together for lookup purposes.) FSO has the ability to make directories.

FileSystemObject object

Office VBA reference topic

docs.microsoft.com

CreateFolder method (Visual Basic for Applications)

Office VBA reference topic

docs.microsoft.com

You would use this in VBA because I don't know that you can reliably create a directory implicitly by creating something to be IN that directory. The keyword here is "reliably" and the VBA method would be most reliable when compared to any other method.

Hi Doc,
Thanks for your answer.
I may have used a misleading word here: I meant a directory more like a phone book : basically a list of people with different levels of details, grouped according different criteria, like in the picture below.
I hope this makes my question clearer.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Ah, yes you did mislead me. But now I understand. Let me describe what I did for my genealogy project for my grandsons (which project, by the way, sort of mushroomed and got crazy-out-of-hand....)

I have a table of people. The table is based on a PersID that is the unique identifier of the person. The person's "attributes" table has a compound PK of PersID, AttrID, and SeqID - person, attribute, and sequence number. SeqID is what I use when the person has TWO brothers so AttrID isn't enough to keep them apart. The rest of the table is a string to hold the value of the the particular attribute. I also have a date field there so that if I have multiple entries of the same type, I can sort on the date field as an "inner" sort order so, for example, can put the dates of events in chronological order when needed.

I have a table of sort order that shows the order in which the attributes will appear on my report, so I JOIN my attributes table to the appearance table and sort by appearance order. First entry is always the name, 2nd is always Birthdate, a very high number is used for death date (remember, this is an ancestry table). There are all sorts of secondary data fields and it gets complex.

Look in this thread, which uses Word to build my family tree "phone book" of people using the table I described above.

Solved - What is the correct way to linearly insert text into Word?

I have searched this site and many others. Web searches galore, but nothing seems to work quite right for me. I am making a document linearly. I.e. providing headers and text and bookmarks and other material in the sequence that I would expect them to be read. But it ain't working. I think...

www.access-programmers.co.uk

Here is a picture of one page of my "phone book"