Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

16.4. Exchanging Data with Microsoft Word

Access 2007 provides a robust set of reporting features for building breathtaking reports. You can sort, group, filter, total, and even employ and manipulate almost every reporting feature using VBA. But even with all of the flexibility supplied by Access, there are still a number of tasks you cannot complete with Access alone and other tasks where you may want to leverage the rich text editing features of Microsoft Word. As such, this section highlights some code samples illustrating how to work with Word using VBA code.

The following code example explores creating a mail merge in Word using application data. While you can create a letter in Access using reports, it may be cumbersome to allow the user to customize the letter once the report has been generated. Fortunately, it is simple to provide users with a boilerplate mail merge document in Word and allow them to customize the mail merge document to suit their needs.

The mail merge code can be written in two ways. The first, and simplest way, is to use Access VBA to define the data source and open the merge document. The second way is to use VBA to perform every step of the mail merge process. You'll examine both methods.

16.4.1. Automate Word to Start Your Merge

If your users are fairly technically savvy with Microsoft Word, they may want to create their own mail merge document. This example uses the Word Object Model to initiate the mail merge using a preexisting Word document. ...