[Peter Jamieson]

Glad you managed to make progress - I was certainly a bit stuck!

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Visit Londinium at http://www.ralphwatson.tv

Mathew Winder wrote:
After playing around with the settings more in Word I seem to have gotten the
DDE connection working properly and thus the right dialog box is now showing
up. It seems now that the query's not passing all of the joined fields onto
the template that it's supposed to, but I'm sure that's another problem
altogether.

I can't thank you enough for your time on this - it's always nice to know
that there's individuals on here willing to give a little effort to save
others some frustration and hair-pulling. You've earned my gratitude.

"Mathew Winder" wrote:

The database and word document are both contained in the same folder on a
network drive. I expect that this could create complications, but I would
have thought that they would have occured earlier in the connection process.

Looking over everything again it appears that you are right - the OLE DB
connection dialog will display Join queries and it is a parameter that it
seems to get caught up on. There are, however, no functions (user-defined or
otherwise) used in the process at all.

My next line of thinking was to try and merge it through Access rather than
Word. I can select the query in Access and link it to the Word Template. At
that point Word prompts me to select the query again, though when I do it
doesn't give me any option to input the parameter, and simply tells me "Word
was unable to open the data source."

If I can come up with a way to pass the parameter to the query before Word
inevitably fails to run it, this method may give me a suitable workaround.

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

I'm really confused why it would
show any other dialog box.

Now I am as well. SO far, I haven't been able to replicate this - when I
specify DDE, I always get the DDE dialog. Is there anything else that
might be "unusual" about your database, its location, etc.

But just to return to this point

however the list of tables and queries to choose from does not
include any
queries that contain an SQL join.

This isn't quite what I normally see either: Queries with joins are
usually presented. But several query types, including Union queries,
parameter queries, queries that use user-defined Access VBA functions,
and queries that use a small number of built-in functions (primarily the
"financial series" ones) are either not presented or do not work as you
might expect, and queries that use the older Jet SQL wildcards * and?
typically return no records.

So I'm wondering if there is something doubly unusual about your database.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Visit Londinium at http://www.ralphwatson.tv

Mathew Winder wrote:
Thanks for your ongoing help and insight.

Whenever I open the Word template it prompts me to choose a data source. I
select the database in the standard file opening dialog box. A dialog box
titled Confirm Data Source then (and has in all tests) popped up prompting me
to select the connection type. There are always three options: OLE DB, DDE,
and ODBC - I always select DDE. The DDE option I select states "MS Access
Databases via DDE (*.mdb;*.mde)" - DDE connections for other Office products
only appear when I select "Show All".

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

I've
selected the DDE connection in all tests

Can you clarify this - it occured to me that you might mean that you
select DDE whenever it is offered, and it would not be offered if either
a. you have not enabled Tools-Options-General-Confirm conversions
at open (on Word 2003) or the equivalent on Word 2007
b. you were connecting to a .accdb rather than a .mdb in which case
you'd only see the OLE DB option unless you check the "Show All" box

Another thing I noticed is that if you check the Show all box and choose
the wrong type of DDE connection (that would be possible even for .mdb)
e.g. if you chose Excel via DDE, Word will indeed open Excel, get it to
open the accdb/mdb, and present an OLE DB-style list of tables.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Visit Londinium at http://www.ralphwatson.tv

Mathew Winder wrote:
Thanks for the input!

I forgot to mention that I'm connecting to the database via a DDE connection
- though you seem to be mostly right; the computer that works is displaying
the DDE dialog box while the ones that don't show the OLE DB dialog. I've
selected the DDE connection in all tests, so I'm really confused why it would
show any other dialog box.

Any ideas?

"Peter Jamieson" wrote:

Quick response because I have to go: It sounds to me as if some of your
PCs are seeing the ODBC connection dialog box (where tables and
queries/views are probably separated) and other PCs are seeing the OLE
DB dialog box (where all the tables and queries that OLE DB wants to
present to you are shown in a single list).

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk
Visit Londinium at http://www.ralphwatson.tv

Mathew Winder wrote:
I'm working to create a registration sheet that will pull known data from an
Access database and plug it into a Word template via mail merge. The data in
Access is contained in a query that uses Joins to pull data from a few
different tables.

While the whole procedure works fine on one of the computers in the office,
it doesn't seem to on any of the others.

When I am picking my datasource in Word I am able to find the database,
however the list of tables and queries to choose from does not include any
queries that contain an SQL join. On the computer that works correctly it
seems to be a different dialogue box altogether; it has queries and tables
split between different tabs whereas the other is just one list, etc.

I'm really at a loss for what may be causing this, let alone how I might go
about fixing it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.