Question Need help with text formatting or exporting to Word (retain formatting necessary)!

[hmoritz72]

Here is my predicament... I have a database that organizes supplemental insurance information. The numbers aren't complicated, but they are asking for some very pretty and elaborate reports for their customers.

Here is how one sentence might look:

"Each year our company name analyzes your group insurance renewal which, under your company's name current contract with current insurer is effective on renewalmonth 1, renewalyear."

The formatting as seen above with bold and color is non-negotiable, unfortunately. The problem is if I do all separate text boxes to accomodate the formatting, can I make a text box move to accomodate a growing text field? OR
Is there a way to format within a text box? THAT would be awesome!

Other options I am willing to explore: exporting information into an existing Word document but the users need to be able to save and keep the data, but I am completely unfamiliar with how to do this (meaning retain formatting and be able to have a Word document that doesn't forever refer back to data in Access that may have bookmark errors if the user were to email it.) Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated!

If anyone knows of a sample database that would show me how to fix this issue, that would help me out too!

Thanks in advance
hmoritz72

 

[PNGBill]

Two things I can think of...

We produce a word mailmerge.
Word Doc is as normal and can be quite complicated if you wish. Just needs a datatable to refer to.
We produce the datatable as a _tempTable in our access database.
We have another database that just does the mailmerge.
It has a module (I googled) that opens our database (users can be happy working on other pc's and don't know this is happening) gets the _temptable and then opens the word mailmerge doc and uses the _temptable to produce the letters.
We end up with a .pdf file (our choice) of so many pages for how ever many letters were selected in the _temptable.
Close the 2nd database and get to work sending out the .pdf pages as they need to go.

Another way we do letters is to produce the actual letter as a report within our database.
You have your report setup with letter head (or not if you print on a letterhead) and where the body of the letter is it is just a series of text fields that are next to each other. May have some label fields for common parts of the letter.

You could have many options for different paragraphs depending on the query result that generated each instance of a letter to be produced.

If you take this to the next step you could concatenate some fields to improve the letter flow. Just like you [firstname]&" "&[lastname] to get "John Smith"
Bit of work setting up but once done saves a lot of time.

Trust helps.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

First things first. Read up on MailMerge. You will NEVER (said emphatically and categorically) get Access to act like a word processor. That isn't its job. On the other hand, Word IS a word processor. The good news is that you can get the two of them to work together because (despite a tendency to cause people to pull their hair out now and then) MS Office is an INTEGRATED suite. That is, the parts actually can work together to produce a finished document that takes the organization of Access and the formatting of Word to produce the final result.

PNGBill's suggestion is spot-on.