Is this possible?

[majorpain]

Need an Access DB that can store .doc files, perform a keyword search on the text in those files, list the results and then open one of the selected result files in Word.

 

[boblarson]

Well, I do not believe one of those exists, so I'm thinking it will cost you at least US $19,800 to build (4 months of 1 FTE developer @ $30 per hour). The hardest part would likely be the search because you'll have to pull the text off of the word files either before or after the attaching. But the database file can only handle up to 2Gb (including system objects) so I think you are asking a lot of Access.

 

[majorpain]

Would this be easier if the files are not stored in Access? Maybe called from a directory somewhere?

 

[boblarson]

Now, if you are just LINKING to the Word file, then that might be possible, but you'd still need to store the text to search (I'm pretty sure, unless you can harness a Windows API to do the search) and the search would get to be slow if done in Access. And you might not be able to store the text in the database anyway depending on the amount of text we're talking about.

 

[majorpain]

We're talking 1-2 page files at the most, but maybe 100 files total? Could you give me an overview on what needs to happen for this to work?

 

[boblarson]

Well, as I see it, you would need to use Word Automation (of which I haven't done much at all - I've done a lot with Excel, but not with Word) to go through the document to pull the information out and then store it in a memo field. A Memo field can store up to 65,535 characters (the help file says it can store more if stored and retrieved programmatically but I'm not too keen on that).

Searches on memo fields are notoriously slow. I don't know what you would want to do in order to speed it up. You could have keywords entered in a text field (255 characters) and go from there.

You can use a built-in file dialog to get the link to the documents and then you would need to store that link and then "scrape" the document.

That's the high level view. I'm not sure I want to visit any lower level myself.

 

[georgedwilkinson]

Why would you use Access for this? There are dozens of programs that do this naturally. Google has free products you can install to do it. Microsoft has free products you can install to do it. And I'm sure a dozen sweat shops wrote programs that do it.

 

[majorpain]

I was not aware of that. Could you be more specific with the Google and MS apps that do this?

 

[Boro]

Supose the easyest way to do this is using VB. You should probablly conect doc files to VB and perform search and open them. Many things
asked in this forum are very specific and it is difficult to say if thay are possible or not until try them.

 

[Mike375]

This might be what you want, not sure.

1) Put all the Word files in one folder

2) Go to Allen Browne's site and look for the function to List Files to a Table. This will put the full path of each file in an Access table and as a record for each file.

3) To the table you made to accomodate Allen Browne's function, add a memo field.

4) Make a form for this table.

5) Make some code that will open the Word doc based on the file name in the table record, the code then does the counterpart of Select All and Copy on the open Word doc. The code then pastes the Word doc into the memo field and then closes the Word doc. Make the code so it will run through the record set.

6) Make a query and with a created field and have FieldNameExp1: InStr([abc],Forms!Form1!Text0). If the key word does not exist the field value will be 0 if it does exist there will be number which is the number of characters that indicates it position. Thus, you want open all the Word docs where the value in the InStr field is >0.

If Form1 is open then the key word is entered in the text box. If the form is not open a parameter box will open and the keyword is entered.

 

[georgedwilkinson]

I was not aware of that. Could you be more specific with the Google and MS apps that do this?

You could have looked on google's web site for that (they are a search engine):
http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa_intranet.html

Free Microsoft stuff:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/try-1.aspx?WT.srch=1

And there's more.

 

[Boro]

This is typical egzample of how to not do the job. First we have problem which is not defined clearly. Second, we couldn't have clear answers on it. The proove for that are very different answers.