Hi, Tiffany. I do a lot of Office project management, which I think
qualifies my response, but the MVPs may not agree.

Personally, if I had the choice whether to Access-Report-It or Mail-Merge-It
using data with an Access DB, I'd do the report. The issue for me has always
been this: What is the end product required? Many people have to email it,
so the Report viewer with Access is not as desirable. But, you can PDF from
Access, too, right? So that's an option. Of COURSE if you can keep it in
Access, do so. What is there reason for wanting a Word document? MUST they
have it in a Word doc for other purposes? If they're "massaging" the reports
AFTER the data is place, the probably they do. Hence, Mail merge. Mail merge
has become extremely unfriendly in newer versions of Office (IMHO), but it's
definitely still doable. You might want to go to the Access ng and ask about
"pushing" the mail merge from that end instead, so the mail merge can be run
from your DB instead of a Word doc. But for mail merge stuff in 2002 and
2003, see:

http://www.officearticles.com/word/m...osoft_word.htm

For 2000, see:

http://www.theofficeexperts.com/word.htm#MailMerge

For "push" from Access (sorry, different versions), see:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;210271
http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/...ght=mail+merge

I hope those help even a little bit!!
*******************
~Anne Troy

www.OfficeArticles.com



"news.microsoft.com" stuff_at_bradc.net wrote in message
...
I could really use some quality advice here to ensure I am not barking up
the wrong technology tree.



I have been an Access Developer for a number of years and I have become
rather good at creating custom reports and exporting to HTML etc.,
however,
I have a customer asking me for something I have not done since my Office
95
days (dating myself here). Namely MAILMERGE.



Currently my customer goes into the field with paper checklists and
gathers
information. They bring the paper checklists back to the office where the
information gets manually added to a boilerplate document (or template),
which then gets massaged into the final product.



There are 2 phases to the project:

In phase 1, they want an easier way to enter the data into their template.
Instead of flipping through all of the pages a entering the information
in
scattered locations, they want to punch it all into a database and merge
it
into the document. In phase 2, they want to start taking PDA's out to the
field to collect the data and they want to sync and merge it in the
office.



Now to my question. 10 years ago, I would have assumed this was a job for
"Mail Merge". Today with the ever changing integration of the Office
Suite,
I am not sure what other technologies I should explore before assuming
that
Mail Merge is, and was, and ever more shall be, my best approach. Is
there
anything else I should be considering?



Any advice (and especially links) would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks in Advance,

Tiffany