Some considerations:
a. who will be producing any code that you might need
b. who will be maintaining the templates (i.e. will it be a
technically-oriented person or someone who does not know how the package as
a whole fits together)
c. how do you decide what to produce and when?
d. what needs to happen to the output after it is distributed? Do the
departments just print the results, or what?
e. did your previous system use Word for this, or are you only considering
Word because of the change of package?
(And which version of Word?)
I don't think you will get very far using recorded macros and you will
probably need to understand and edit them substantially to get what you
need, but they can take you quite a long way.
[Personally, I would at least consider having a look at something like the
Reporting Services features in SQL Server 2005 (I believe that there is a
version even with the free SQL Server Express 2005, but I do not know
whether it is severely limited compared to the real thing). I can't say I
know much about it, and e.g. whether it would be easy to work with Oracle
data, but it's the kind of thing that is geared to this sort of
applciation.]
Peter Jamieson
"Holly Schott" Holly
wrote in message
...
Hello. I work at a University that is changing student software package
and
therefore changing how we do business. Our Recruiting and Admissions
department sends out more than 50 different letters to various populations
continuously throughout the year. The data is extracted, one file per
letter, from the student Oracle database into a doc files and is they are
ftp'd to the departments pc.
I have tested by setting up 2 macros each containing one letter's mail
merge. Each macro begins by opening the word doc and ends with printing
the
letters and closing without saving. I then set up a 3rd (Master) macro
which
runs the 2 letter macros. This works but was difficult to set up (the
macro recorder is picky).
All of the original letter docs will be changed periodicly.
Could someone tell me a better way to do this?
Thanks