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Comment - RE: Mailmerge from NAB to MS Word

Comment by Wolfgang Flamme on 30 Jan 2004 ():

This might be of interest for people who require a single-document printing and reporting:

The standard WinWord automation solution for this is based upon bookmarks. However there are some drawbacks when using this method.

1. Bookmarks come in two flavours: position (standard) and range. Unskilled users tend to use the standard when creating a template so when updating the contents of the document text is appended after the position bookmark, not updated.

2. Bookmarks names suffer from name restrictions thus you cannot reliably use Notes' field names as bookmarks which complicates the mapping procedure, especially for unskilled users.

Both problems make it hard for unskilled users to create a word reporting template and reliably match the fields with Notes (or another data source).
So I've developed a DocVariable-based alternative described in my german article Word als Druckschnittstelle (Word as a Printing Engine) .

http://www.sns1.de/partner/flamme/wflamme.nsf/Shortcut/WordInterface1

A OOP solution based on that approach has run in a professional environment for over a year now w/o problems. I can highly recommend it, the end users love it.

Unfortunately I didn't find the time to translate the article (yet).

Sth else to consider: At least Word2000 and earlier have a problem with automation. If an instance of word is created by automation and not visible, then any further Word instances and macros will point to the same object and interfere with your automation process (Microsoft Knowledge Base Article No. Q188546).

My article mentioned above shows a LotusScript solution for that problem, too.

HTH somebody here dealing with Word interfacing.

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