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Using AccuTerm to Automate Mail Merge Between the MV Database and Microsoft Word

By Joe Goldthwaite, Bar-S Foods

In this article, we're going to explore ways to use Word's ActiveX Document architecture and AccuTerm's scripting language to automatically merge Pick data with a Word document.  Microsoft Word is a very powerful word processing system.  With the addition of Active X automation, it gains much more flexibility.  Almost any feature in Word can be accessed from your Pick based system.  

A mail merge operation in Word is a fairly simple process.  You first create a source document and link it to a data source.  From there, you can insert special codes into the source document that tell Word where you want the data fields to go.  Word can access a variety of data formats; Excel, Access, SQL or even text files. The important thing to keep in mind is that Word needs to be able to match up field names in the source file with the mail merge fields in the source document.  For our purposes, the perfect format is the tab delimited text file that reserves the first line for the field names.  This is a simple file format that you can create automatically with AccuTerm's file transfer utility - FTD.  It is also an easy format to work with.  You can edit and change the file using Notepad, Word itself, Excel or any number of other Windows programs.  

Our sample application consists of three parts.  First the text file mentioned above. The name we're going to use is "c:\MergeData.txt".  Second, we're going to create a word document that will be linked to the c:\MergeData.txt file and will act as the source document. We're going to call it "c:\MergeSample.doc".  Third, we're going to create a script that will be downloaded from AccuTerm and will instruct Word to do the actual mail merge.

Most of the work involved in doing a mail merge is handled by our source document – MergeSample.doc.  If you have some experience with Word mail merges, this will be much simpler. If not, read on.  Creating a source document is easy.  The only difficulty is remembering the field names.  Word can help us here but only if we first connect the document to our data before we start inserting the merge fields.  Here's the step by step.

1.  Download a sample data file using FTD so we have a data source to attach to the new source document. This will allow you to choose field names to insert into the new source document.  To download the data from Pick, we'll use the FTD command.  We created a Pick file called MERGEDATA.  It has dictionary items for "Name", "Address", "City", "State", "Zip".  The names are case sensitive.  Here's the session that created the c:\MergeData.txt file.  The items in bold are the ones we typed.  

>FTD

AccuTerm Data Transfer Utility

(S)end, (R)eceive, (C)onfigure, (O)ptions, (H)elp or (E)xit ? S

File transfer protocol: (A)SCII or (K)ERMIT ? K

Enter source (PICK) file name: MERGEDATA

Enter source (PICK) item list: *

Enter target (DOS) file name (d:\directory\file.ext): c:\mergedata.txt

Attributes to transfer: Name Address City State Zip

Generate Header Record (<Y>/N): Y

Explode MultiValue Fields (Y/<N>): N

Transfer status: Successful transfer.

Transferred 9 items, 391 bytes.

2.  Start Word and create a new document.

3.  Select Tools->MailMerge from the Word menu  This will display a dialog box with a series of buttons. The only button that will be active at this point, is the create button.  Select Create and choose Form Letter from the drop down menu.  You are then given the choice of using the Active Window or creating a new main document.  We want to use the Active Window.

4.  The Edit and Get Data buttons should now be enabled. The next step is to connect this document to our data file. Click on the Get Data button and select Open Data Source.  You should get an open file dialog box.  Go ahead and open the c:\MergeData.txt file.

5.  Now we can start actually typing our document.  Any place you want to use the data from the MergeData.txt file, click on the Insert Merge Field button and select the desired field name from the drop down list.

6.  After the document looks the way you want it to, save it to "c:\MergeSample.doc"

We now have a word document that contains our form letter and is connected to the MergeData.txt file as a data source.  We're now ready for the next step.  Getting our Pick data and performing the mail merge from AccuTerm's scripting language.  Repeat step 1 with the entire dataset that you want to use with your form letter.  Once the data source (text file) has been downloaded, all we need to do is start up Word, load our source document and tell it to do the mail merge.  It already knows the file with the data source and the field names.  To do this, we'll execute this script:

'First create our object variables

Dim WordApp As Object

Dim WordDoc As Object

Const SendToPrinter = 1

'Make sure errors don’t mess us up

On Error Resume Next

'Start up word

Set WordApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")

'Open our source document

Set WordDoc = WordApp.Documents.Open(FileName:="C:\MergeSample.doc", ReadOnly:=True)< /FONT>

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