Is Excel a better way to use letters as Forms

[rickaddison]

I've looked at some threads that have been posted and none seem exactly on point for what I need to do. We've created a 2010 Access Database to track information and produce various reports. We have several Word documents that we used prior to the database for requesting and sending information. From what I've read in other threads, I get the impression that using Word with Access is not necessarily the best way to go. Would it be better to recreate these letters in Excel and link them to our database using the field names from Access in the Excel files? I'm relatively new to the programming side of Access. I've had some experience but it's been a while and I used Access 2003. Can you give me some guidance on this?

Thanks,

Rick

 

[Pat Hartman]

If you are going to use the documents for transfering data, Excel is by far the easier to work with. If the data is organized as a table in Excel with column headers in row 1 and data starting in row 2 and not spread cell by cell all over creation, you can just use the TransferSpreadsheet method to import or export it. If you have it all pretty'd up like a report, you'll be writing a lot of automation code to pick up the pieces.

 

[rickaddison]

Thanks for your reply but I'm not certain that I gave a good explanation of what I'd like to do. I have several letters in Word that are mailed to clients we will be using our Access database to track. I'm trying to determine the best way to use the letters with the database. I'm hoping to not have to create the letters as forms in Access. Can I use Excel in someway to create (or import) the letters and then somehow link my database and the Excel form so that I can have data from Access go to Excel? Is it possible?

Thanks,

Rick

 

[Pat Hartman]

You can export Access reports to word or you can use mailmerge or automation to create word documents. If you are talking about importing data, Word is a poor choice.

Creating the letters as reports would be the simplest solution and require no code. Mailmerge and automation both require VBA.

 

[rickaddison]

I think I'm going to use mail merge based on queries. I've created one query already that seems to work fine. Is there anything I may need to be aware of?

Thanks,

Rick

 

[Pat Hartman]

If you have dates, make sure they format correctly in the Word document. If they don't, then use the Format() function in the query so they can be exported as strings. Same for things like zip code which may drop the leading zero.