Getting Access to auto creat letters for a mailing list

[Village]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to access, so I apologise if there is a simple solution
for this, but I have looked everywhere that I can think off to see if
this is possible and how to do it.

I have been tasked with creating a database of customers previous
purchases and then sending out letters to them, these letters would
need to be personalised so that for example: if Mr X brought good Y
then the letter would automatically select a passage of text (paragraph
A for example) and insert it into the body of the letter, if the
customer brought good Z then a different paragraph (paragraph B) of
text would be inserted.

So simply is it possible to get it Access to compose individualised
letters such as these?

Thanks in advance,

Village

[Larry Linson]

"Village" <al*********@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:11**********************@g47g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...

Hello,

I'm fairly new to access, so I apologise if there is a simple solution
for this, but I have looked everywhere that I can think off to see if
this is possible and how to do it.

I have been tasked with creating a database of customers previous
purchases and then sending out letters to them, these letters would
need to be personalised so that for example: if Mr X brought good Y
then the letter would automatically select a passage of text (paragraph
A for example) and insert it into the body of the letter, if the
customer brought good Z then a different paragraph (paragraph B) of
text would be inserted.

So simply is it possible to get it Access to compose individualised
letters such as these?

It is relatively easy if you don't need any fancy formatting because Access'
format applies to everything in the standard text box. This has always been
sufficient for the modest letter-writing capabilities my clients have
needed. It is easy to concatenate text strings, e.g., strGreeting = "Dear
" & strClientTitle & ClientName & ":" Memo fields can hold a significant
amount of text, as can string variables, so you can use those for your
"boilerplate" text.

You can get fancy formatting by using a Rich Text Control -- one used to
come with the Office Developer Edition, but may or may not be in the current
Visual Studio Tools for Office 2003 product; FMS sells one, and I believe
MVP Stephen Lebans has a free one. I caution this will be more work that
the first option.

But, if you can customize with words instead of paragraphs, it might be
easier to use the mail merge facility and do the printing in Word, if you
need a bit more than "plain text".

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

[Steve]

As Larry said, a Word mail merge would probably take care of this
problem. You would compose a list of customers and their purchases,
then use the mail merge feature and create a template for that data to
run through. You can customize every component of the merged letter,
meaning if you do need to bold or italicize some words here and there
it's just as easy as doing the same thing with a normal Word document.

Access is more powerful in that it gives you many more options and much
more control over the process, but it's also a lot more complicated
than the mail merge.