To confirm Doug's message, Access/Jet .mdb format is the standard from
Word 2002 onwards (on Windows, that is).
However, for Word to use a .mdb as a data source, the student does not
necessarily need Access on their system.
At this point it gets a bit technical.
At the very least, what they need is something called the MDAC and the
Jet database engine. One or both of these may be installed as standard
as part of Windows XP and/or Vista, but are probably still available as
downloads from Microsoft.
If they need to connect to the database using DDE (e.g. if they need to
connect to a parameter query in Access), then they will need Access
itself. So any course needs to be designed so that it does not use
queries that require DDE to be used - e.g. avoid
a. parameter queries
b. queries that use wildcards, e.g. "WHERE something LIKE '*'"
c. queries that use user-defined Access VBA functions
d. queries that use linked tables
e. queries that use financial series functions, the VBA function
replace, and perhaps some others.
Peter Jamieson
http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
swedeace wrote:
I'm doing some research for one of our instructors in regards to one of her
distance learning students. Supposedly, this student does not have MS Access
and is trying to do mail merge to get their assignment done. What file
extension does the mail merge database appear like in Word to someone who
doesn't have MS Access? Thanks.