Mail merge - general outputs

[Emily Jones]

The client needs mail merge. It's a database for a training company.
Sometimes a paragraph, sentence or whatever might be
present/absent/different depending on what sort of course it is, what sort
of client is paying for the course, what job the student has.

Usually the differentness about the merge output will apply to ALL students
(i.e. all letters on that particular run). But sometimes it'll just apply to
some students on the run.

So far this is implemented as a query/Word template thing. As per Ken Getz's
'Access Cookbook'. But it's getting big and messy.

What's more Word is very data unaware. Whereas Access reports are far
better, obviously. The client loses the editability, but I'm managing to
push them that way, I think.

But if I'm going to restructure how I do this, I only want to do it once
(some hope, eh?)

I'm considering this. Each 'real' data table will have a companion 'text
sections' table. E.g.

tblCourses:
ID Name
1 Pottery for beginners
2 Advanced brain surgery

tblCoursesText:
FK LetterType Section Text
1 WelcomeLetter 1stPara What on earth do you want to learn pottery
for
2 WelcomeLetter 1stPara Welcome to brain surgery
2 EndOfCourse LastPara So off you go, only 4 weeks on the
course and now you can do your own lobotomy

The first 3 fields would be a primary key, but maybe surrogated (if that's a
word).

Then I started to think. Maybe another table to store the format details,
basically a complete description of each Report Object. Of course, that may
be a bit silly. As if I have saved Report then it's there.

But I'm starting to think this all looks a bit like, eek, XML.

What sort of experience has anybody got of using XML in, out (shake it all
about) of Access, especially reports.

Cheers, Emily