Storing mail merge and send as needed

[dniezby]

Need advice on best way to do this.

I will be writing several documents that will be mail merge docs. When I add a new contact to my DB I want to be able to open a contact activity form, select one of the docs via drop down and send that doc merged for that contact via email.

So what would be the best way to do this? Create the docs and store them in a folder and just reference them in the table or store the whole doc in the actual table?



I want to be able track that I sent that document to someone as well. This way I'm not sending a contact repeats.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Micron]

I take it that there is more than one document type so you can't use one template. Either way, I'd keep the documents in their own folder rather than embed them in a table. One way to access them is via the Application.FollowHyperlink method but a method using the Open statement is less buggy IMHO. As for recording, all you really need is a table with fields for the recipient and a yes/no field to flag as sent, plus whatever else makes sense for that process (such as document name, date sent, etc.).

[dniezby]

No, I am only going to be using one document type. They will be Word Docs merged to the database.

[Micron]

by document type, I didn't mean .doc versus .xls versus .pdf, etc. I meant the structure of one Word document would be different than another, hence you couldn't use a template as the base file. Now I think you mean there's one doc and you're going to merge it with records from a table or query and send that as an email attachment, probably saving a copy of the merged document somewhere. If that's the gist of the question, then I think most here would agree that storing the path to the document is the way to go. Storing files in an Access database causes rapid bloating of the db file size and can be temperamental. I'd use folder storage and decide on one of the aforementioned methods of retrieving the document. My preference would be the Open method if for no other reason than I'm fairly certain you can control the mode of access; e.g. open read only. Plus FollowHyperlink wasn't originally created for opening files IIRC.