Access Reports = Boilerplate text

[sstrause424]

Does Access support any type of free text or boiler plate text in a report? Specific case is a small non profit and end of the year giving statements - all the gift info is stored in Access database and up to now we have been doing Word mail merges to generate the receipts.



- The organization diretort rights a paragraph long "Thank you fir your continued support . . ." which talks about what the organization accomplished the past year. This lasy year the paragraph was just over 150 words.
We many just have to continue using mail merges for this because I'm not suire the standard text tools will support - please let me know if I am missing something.

Thanks

Sheldon

[Welshgasman]

I think it would be pretty much the same as in mailmerge.
You would need if statements to know what to show?

You could have it all stored in a memo field and then do a DlookUp() ?

[sstrause424]

Here I'm using the word statements as another term for receipts, as in the whole report is a statement of account.
I'll look at what you mention but so far I'm inclined to stay with the mail merge. I was hoping to use the Access report somewhat I have used Crystal reports or Oracle Reports in the past, but they both supported some time of boiler plate or unbound text
paragraphs.

[pbaldy]

You can have a textbox with a control source of:

="Thank you fir your continued support . . ."

If you run into length issues you can break it into separate textboxes. I'd use a table field as already mentioned though.

[CJ_London]

you can use a longtext field to store your boilerplate text and if you need to include other data such as the donor name or value of gift, use a placeholder and the replace function when outputting. e.g.

"Dear [donorname],

Thank you for your gift of [giftvalue]"


and in the query for your report

fulltext: replace(replace([boilerplateText],"[donorname]",[donor]),"[GiftValue]",[Gift])