Suggestion on Direction (Spinning My Wheels)

[ctackett6407]

Greetings Folks,

I've been spending the past week or two learning Excel and Access from a service my employer has access too called Lynda.

It seems great for people who are very novice like myself. I've completed a lot of the courses for basic understanding of Excel and Access with the goal of creating something that will help myself and my peers doing their job a little easier.

We are in a Call Center and when people call in and do various transactions there could be letters associated with those transactions. We then have to note their account and go back and manually type out letters, print them on letter head, and then mail them.

I am trying to find a way were I can use a system with a nice easy to use GUI to type in the information and it automatically inputs into the letter, without much effort of the user, and then we can just print and go.. or print in mass and it know which template to use.

I started making something in access but realized you have to use Mail Merger to finish that and I couldn't figure out if it could use a nifty GUI so those with a lot less computer skills could understand it.. and when I did access..

I made 1 database and then started creating forms and then realized they do not look that good compared to the regular Word file that has our company header on it.

Any feedback? I keep sending days learning things to use and then realizing that I'm spinning my wheels.

If I can get a direction then I can focus my energies on something that might work.

I got a suggestion that another company has a program that they just enter the Account Number and select the letter and it will generator the letter and all they do is print... I thought I could do that with Excel .. but I wasn't sure if that was possible.

 

[jakeman]

One solution is one that I recall from an organization I worked for. They had an Excel template that housed a User Input form in an Excel sheet, and multiple letters that were actual Excel sheets, just formatted in a way that they would look like a regular Word document. So for example, let's say your company has 7 different letters that go out using certain language and whenever a situation calls for that particular letter to go out to a customer, the Customer information would get populated in the User Input form, and the relevant letter would be selected and the customer information would populate in that letter. Then from that sheet, the user could print the letter, email the letter, etc.

 

[ctackett6407]

I might try this, the only thing is we have to manually enter the information for the initial part.. so I'm thinking I might do something where it has a GUI in excel so they can just type in specific info and it inject it into the rows on the excel sheet.. I'll look up ideas on how to make word like templates in excel. Thanks for the reply.

 

[jakeman]

Right on. As far as how make Word style templates in Excel, essentially all you are doing is formatting the Excel sheet to look like a Word document. And yes, you would want to set up the "GUI" as a form, that you can then use to populate the letter in the other sheet.