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