Gill
I have done something perhaps similar to this. The answer you want depends on the format of the questionnaire. The fact that it is in Word is a good start, because you can do some decent (notice I avoided NICE) things using object automation (used to be called ActiveX, but that has a bad name in the security industry now.)
Before we get started, the odds are that you are looking towards some VBA code. Dollars to donuts says the questionnaire's format isn't quite right for a direct import.
Before you start writing, you have some studying to do. I'll tell you where to look. In the Help files for Access, you can look up Objects and Automation. In the Help Files for Word, you can look up the Word2K topics as follows
Contents>>Programming Information>>Microsoft Word Visual Basic
Then browse around inside that section. It will take a while to read and it ain't easy. What you are looking for is an understanding of the Component Object Model as applied to MS Word. Basically, Word publishes the contents of a document to COM as a series of collections. What you will do in Access is use VBA to explore those collections.
Next, you must get into Access, open a general module (a New one if you don't have one already started), and then follow menu path
Tools>>References
In order to make this kind of project work, you must check the references for Word. Office wouldn't hurt either, though you won't use much from it. (If you were going to use spreadsheets, you would also make sure you checked Excel.) Once those checks are in place, the Methods and Objects defined in the Word VBA Help section become exposed for your use.
I'm going to give you some code snippets and comments about what each one does. It will be up to you to work with them.
To open a particular word document from VBA you need
Dim objApp as Object
Set objApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")
objApp.Documents.Open
filename, , false, false, false
This opens a specific Word document read-only. Now, if you don't care to actually see the document open, then between the Set objApp line and the .Open line, insert this line
objApp.Visible = false
With me so far? The document is open and invisible. When the rest of your coding is done, don't forget to close the document AND the object. Otherwise you will slowly deplete your system's resources, eventually requiring a reboot. You would get all sorts of oddball messages about 'unable to open another xyz...' where xyz is some form, report, or other object within Access.
Now, the next part depends on how the questionnaire is built.
Once you have an active document, you can see several collections. One of these is the Tables collection. Another is the Paragraphs collection. You can also see Words. You can also see Lists. One of these is going to be helpful. But here is where things get hazy, because this medium does not permit me to give you precise details of everything you will need to know.
Let me narrow it down to a couple of possibilities. The one I use most often, I'll do first. The next most likely, I'll do next. The rest of the possibilities, you're on your own.
If your questionnaire is table-oriented (i.e. Column 1 of a table is the question, column 2 is the answer) then you have a piece of cake. Each table in a document is numbered. So if there is a single table, then the tables collection is what you want.
In this case, declare a variable to be a Word.Row. Then you can do something like this (prefix str means string, lng means long, I'm not going to actually Dim everything...)
For lngRowNum = 1 to ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Rows.Count loop
rowCurrent = ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Rows(lngRowNum)
strAnswer = rowCurrent.Cells(2).Range.Text
{do something with the answer here}
next lngRowNum
If you have more than one table, then you will have a variable for the table number, too.
You could add data to a recordset from the questionnaire based on what you extracted in the loop. (That's what I do in the application where I use this.)
OK, the other possibility is a numbered list of questions where the numbering WAS done with the numbered-list toolbar button.
In that case, you are looking at a collection of lists. If there is only one collection, your data is in
ActiveDocument.Lists(1)
Here, you would iterate based on the value returned from the Lists
.CountNumberedItems method as the number of entries in the list. You would extract data from a list by stepping through the list as follows (I think, though it gets tricky here)
ActiveDocument.Lists
.ListParagraphs(m).Paragraph.Range.Text
The above is the text in one of the numbered items of your list.
Now the bad news. If the questionnaire isn't table or list oriented, or if the list is not numbered but is instead BULLETED, then you have to read the paragraphs one at a time.
So there, the collection is
ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
.Range.Text
But you have to do some gyrations to get the data out. Look up the use of the Selection object because I believe that you need to select text before you can directly extract it from a paragraph.
Good luck on this. It seems like the above is lot to absorb at once - so don't try. Make frequent reference to the help files. Look at what I wrote and then LOOK IT UP in the help files. You might read some of it differently than I do. And don't be afraid to play with it. As long as you open the document read-only, you can't hurt it. So don't be afraid to fall flat on your face a couple of times playing with it.
