Importing PDF file into Access

[gary g]

I am running Access 2007. On my switchboard I would like to create a link to a stand alone PDF file located in a folder outside of the database. If I go to the External Data tab in Access it allows me to link to many different types of external files (text, HTML, XML, etc.). But I don't see any way to create a simple link on the switchboard that will open the PDF file. Is such a link possible to be made? Thanks.

 

[sxschech]

take a look at hyperlink and the followhyperlink method. Here is an example. There are some additional parameters that go after the file name separated by commas.

FollowHyperlink "c:\temp\myfile.pdf"

 

[spikepl]

What does "Link to" mean in this context? If you want to open it for display, then just do as #2 says. If you want to read the data then that requires some coding: some code that can extract the pdf data into eg a text file, and then code that can read the text file.

DUH now I saw the title. There are tools out there that can convert a PDF to Excel or text. I use the free xpdf tool pdftotext that I run in an Access shell to produce a text file that I then read from Access.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

well, xml, spreadsheets, text files are all structured

a pdf is (ostensibly) a graphical image (ie text may be different sized, - so you are going to need some special stuff to extract meaningful data from a pdf.

I think it is probably not quite a graphic file, like a jpeg - but neither is it a normal asciii file - so you won't mange a pdf by normal means, i am sure. In the same way you won't import a word document into access.