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I'm building an order processing system in MS Access 2013 that allows the employee to input order details from the customer's form, then the system records this in the database and generates an invoice (which will then be printed in black and white and colour).

The invoice should look identical to the old invoices, which were generated using a Word document and a MailMerge from a big old excel spreadsheet.

If I try and Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, then paste everything into the report in design view in Access, the formatting is preserved but it's an embedded word document, which is not ideal. If I paste individual elements, it seems they each become mini embedded Word documents - again, not what I want.

Any better ideas about how I could achieve this? Cheers.

EDIT: I'm attempting to use a PNG of the document with the spaces to be filled in by the report blank as an image in the background of the report. The image looks very jaggy and artifacty though.

jellyberg
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2 Answers2

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The only solution I could find was hacky and horrible, but got the job done (eventually).

I converted the doc to a jpg, set the jpg as the background image of the Access report, then manually recreated all the elements and lined them up with the background image.

jellyberg
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I found this question when I searched for a solution. I did not find a solution so I tried a little more myself. This is what I did and what works fine:

  1. Create an Access report
  2. Highlight a part of the word document, copy
  3. Paste this into the Access report. This will create an Unbound Object Frame including that part of the Word document. This looks like a picture but it isn't a picture. By changing the Size Mode to Zoom the text will reformat - just like in Word.
  4. Double clicking on the embedded document allows editing - just like in Word.

I copied and pasted several part for the following reason:

  • I replaced some parts of the original document with text boxes to show values out of the database
  • I separated big parts so that they fit the pages in Access. If one part was too long to show it on one page then I copied another part (i.e. the 2nd page in the original document) and then that was shown also as the second page in the Access report.

Report and page headers and footers can be used like normal in Access.

I used this to make sure the (legal) document is saved in Access. I could have done this with Word (and I did this for other projects). But then the text is in Word and could be edited and this is not perfect in certain scenarios.

Edgar
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