Dynamic Word Document Generation

[Domski]

Once again I've been given a nice little job to do and am after a bit of advice.

It's coming up to the time of year where we have to send out hundreds of service level agreements. What I've been asked to do is automate the production of the documents to save someone spending days putting them together.

The basic premise is that we would have an Excel workbook that would indicate what services each client takes and then each SLA would then be built up of the relevant sections.

Has anyone got any advice as to the best way to achieve this. I've had all sorts of thoughts from using Access through to HTML but am hoping there's quite an easy way of doing this that I am unaware of.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Dom

 

[Macropod]

Hi Dom,

With a correctly set up Excel file, containing client details and fields to indicate which variable aspects of the service level agreements apply, you could easily do this with a mailmerge. To control the content of the output files, all you'd need is an IF test along the lines of:
{IF{MERGEFIELD Var1}= "A" "Text for variable A"}
The output for a given variable could contain multiple paragraphs, and even other mergefields.

 

[Domski]

Cheers, I'll give it a go.

Dom

 

[Domski]

Works a treat. Thanks a lot.

For info I found quite a good document on how to set up the merge fields: http://word.mvps.org/faqs/mailmerge/mmergeiffields.htm

Dom

 

[Trevor G]

Be careful with Date Fields though as they can switch things in Word on Mail Merge Fields.

 

[Domski]

True but as long as you use a DDE connection this isn't a problem as it pulls the formatting from the Excel file.

Dom

 

[Macropod]

Be careful with Date Fields though as they can switch things in Word on Mail Merge Fields.

I assume you're referring to to day/month order changing. This can be controlled via a formatting switch applied to the mergefield, as can the formatting of numbers and currency values. Indeed, the availability of formatting switches frees you from having to work with the formatting applied to the source data.