Is it possible to...

[mholst]

Hi all! Total and complete beginner here.



My company has a report, a Word document using legacy form fields, that supervisors have to fill out. The reports are then e-mailed to an individual that manually enters the information from them into an Excel worksheet.

I want to automate this process using Access, but I have two issues. (1) Our supervisors do not have Access and (2) I'm not sure if Access is capable of importing data from the Word documents.

Am I wanting something that I can not have?

Thanks in advance.

[Dal Jeanis]

1) Yes, you can use automation to read the fields from the Word document. This automation could be in the word document itself, so that it connects up and uploads its own information, or it could be in Access or some other application.

2) If I were doing it, I would probably change the word form to an excel form, since I'm more confident how the code would work (I haven't automated anything in Word around here, although I know it's feasible.)

3) There is a facility that would allow you to distribute a "run time environment" to users who do not have full Access. That is one possibility, but I have no idea how the licensing works.

4) If your supervisors have access to an intranet, then you could develop an Access web application. (Not recommended at your level, since there are very few people posting here, or anywhere else I've seen, with enough experience to answer questions about it yet.)

5) As an arbitrary but simple architecture idea, you could have each document output a plain text comma-delimited file with a unique name to a staging folder on the "individual's" desktop, then have Access suck in all files that it sees there and process them. Then you have only three technical issues - (A) selecting a naming convention for the files and an export format for the data (B) adding the export macro to the Word form document (C) adding the import macro to Access.

All of that is small stuff, with examples all over the web, so your request is definitely feasible. I'd avoid 3 and 4 myself, in favor of some combination of 1, 2 and 5.