Template in MS word

[Winos2Mac]

I need help with a template I want to create. You seei work at a small law firm and I want to creat a form in MS word where the user just had to enter in the sender, recipent and the fax number(s) will show up in a lost box for the user to be able to select the correct one.

Then they would click the "OK" buton and a MS word Fax transmittal sheet would pop up on their screen with all of the correct information. I have already designed a small form (the attached image) but I am a little rusty on my Visual Basic. I took some classes but it was a while back. But I do have a basic understanding

I'm thinking that I need to create an excel file of some sort with all of the contacts names and available fax numbers, and the form wil read the data from that one Excel worksheet. That way I can update the excel worksheet whenever we have a new contact to add.

Can anyone help me with this or lead me on the right path, any suggestions?

Thanks, I really appreciate it.

[Winos2Mac]

This is basically what the template will look like when It's in MS. Word. This is what i want printed out with all of the correct information entered automatically.

Thanks again!

[osprey4]

What version of Office are you using?

I'm not sure VB is needed. You just need to create a Word template.

Regarding using an Excel list, this can be accomplished using mail merge.

[Winos2Mac]

I'm using MS word 2000.

VB is not needed? really?

I have created a Word template, but I want a button in the toolbar that says "FAX" and when the user clicks it the form pops up where the enter the Information and once they click OK the Template will show and allow them to enter in a small message.

I need this type of setup because we have a lot of fax transmittal sheets saved on out system and some have outdated numbers or some clients have more than one Fax number where they can be reached.

Thanks!

[Winos2Mac]

anyone?

[Winos2Mac]

<<bump>>

[ctaylor]

Sorry, I have never had need to figure this out, but if I was to do this, I would probably do it in MS Access. This would have the advantage of preventing someone from sorting a column in the MS Excel spreadsheet and corrupting your entire fax data spreadsheet.


OPTION #1 (more complex to create)
If you want to write this totally from MS Word, I would start by looking up DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) in the help files. DDE is used to pass data to and from different MS Office applications. Using DDE requires some VBA programming and might require some head scratching if you are not familliar with VB. Fortunately VB is one of the easier languages to figure out.

(My limited experience with DDE is to take data from MS Access, open a new MS Excel file and pass data through to cells in the spreadsheet, have MS Excel perform mathematical operations unavailable in MS Access, and then return the results from MS Excel to MS Access before exiting from MS Excel.)


OPTION #2 (easier to create)
figure out how to run a mail merge operation through VBA.

OVERALL STRATEGY
I suspect that you would want to

1 - insert a new toolbar containing a FAX command button
2 - have the button call a form with a combo box bound to the data stored in an MS Access table so that all unique values in the table become available as selections within the combo box
3 - have a click event initiated when a value is selected from the combo box that will filter out only that record from the MS Access table and then mail merge the filtered record into a MS Word document.

Unfortunately I do not know enough about MS Word VBA to tell you how to do this, but can tell you that you can create custom buttons by selecting VIEW => TOOLSBARS => CUSTOMIZE => select the TOOLBARS tab => click the NEW button. You can then create a macro to assign to that button.

I hope this helps.

[Winos2Mac]

That does help a lot. You got it right on the nose. Thats exatly what i want to do. But I dont think I know enough vba or DDE experience to do that.

I will try and learn as fast as possible and if you or anyone can help me allong i would really appreciate it.

THanks!

[ctaylor]

The first thing to learn about VBA is that MS Word VBA is different than MS Excel VBA, which is different from MS Access VBA.

I know it is a little different than what you have asked for, but you could probably get something up and running much faster with an MS Access database.

1 - You could create a table of contact info to populate the name address fax # etc from

(1A - you could create a memo datatype field in the table to hold comments to put on the fax cover sheet)

2 - you could create a form to display all the name information and allow for the cover sheet comment to be typed.

(2A - or you could create a form with a combo box that would store a value used to filter out the record/contact you want to show in the form in step 2)

3 - you could then run a report to print a hard copy of the fax coversheet.

(If my memory is correct, lawyers love paper. If they have a physical piece of paper to show a judge then they often think that the judge could understand.)


It's not MS Word, but it's pretty easy to do. MS Access has a wizard to create the form and another wizard to create the report. You can use your mouse to resize and move controls that the wizard places on a form or report.

You can also use google.com to look for

"MS Access"+tutorial

too if you would like a reference.