Best Way to Approach Standard Letters?

[rts]

Hello,



I've been working my way through Access and I have a db that I'm pretty happy with, but I can't figure out the best way to go about Standard letters. We have about 10 standard letters in my company. I want to print them directy from the editable form, not as a report. I've laid the form out with our letterhead, standard fields, etc so that it prints just fine, but I don't know how to go about the different bodies of the letters. I wanted to be able to select an [ID] primary key to populate the text box with the appropriate letter body, but the problem is that some of the bodies contain parts that need to be filled in according to the current letter I am printing. For example, one letter body refers to a $ amount that I enter in another field on the COR form. If I pull the letter bodies from the "Letter" table, they will not find the values to insert from the COR table. It instead will say "Attached is our proposal for " & [SUB_VAL] & "for the current project." There is no way for that field to figure out what [SUB_VAL] is.

I know I can input ="Attached is our proposal for " & [SUB_VAL] & "for the current project." in the control source of a text box, but I want the staff to be able to edit the text boxes as well. I want the general standard language of the letter, but I want everyone to be able to put the cursor anywhere and add a sentence. I thought about Iif, DLookup, etc., but haven't found anything that works. At the end of the day, what's the best way to create standard editable letters in Access? Thanks for any help!

[June7]

Access won't work that way. It is not a text editor, it is a data manager. Users input data into tables through forms as interface. Reports output that data. You can have an unbound textbox that allows user to input anything but surrounding labels and textboxes probably won't space properly for the appearance of formatted sentence or paragraph. Could also have input parameter prompts in the form's RecordSource query that will take any input from user, misspellings and bad punctuation included.

[rts]

Thank you. I realize that was asking a little too much.