Re: Has anyone Created a word Doc directly from SQR?

["Thomas D. Hins" <Thomas-Hins@OUHSC.EDU>]

Don is very astute in his reply.  Importing the text file created from sqr
into word is not always pretty, things will wrap, etc unless you have the
page size large enough, etc.  Then you have to make sure whomever is
changing the document to have track changes turned on otherwise you will
lose the changes.  Personally I don't think that is a good way to make
changes to data.  Don's solution to store them in a file is much better.
Make a panel for the users to browse the data and make changes with code in
field change to store original value would be more usefull.  HTH and jmo.
Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Mellen [mailto:donm@ONTKO.COM]
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 12:47 PM
To: SQR-USERS@list.iex.net
Subject: Re: Has anyone Created a word Doc directly from SQR?


On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Scott Barnes wrote:

> I have a report that is filled with lots of information for departments at
> a University.  It consists of a three page report for each class, and was
> previously printed marked on and give back to someone to enter in the
> computer.  Now they want to have it in word so they can track the changes
> from the old version to the version modified by the user.
>
> If anyone have made a work doc from SQR please send me some code?  Or
offer
> an alternative would be appreciated?

It sounds like what you want is to keep track of changes to the data.
If this is the case, I would suggest that you look into keeping track of
the changes on the database side, rather than using word.  (I've seen
places use oracle triggers to track changes in a/several log tables, and
others have the system used to enter the data do it).

If they want the information off the computer and just want them in Word,
then just make the initial Word docs and forget about it.  You can run the
reports to a lineprinter file and import the base text to Word, then
format by hand, since it's a one time deal (depending on volume, which you
did not state) or print to html and import that into Word (maybe PDF to
Word? I don't know if Word does this by itself or not).  Just some top of
the head suggestions

If they simply want to distribute (or entirely offload) the work of
putting in the changes to the people making them, and keep the data in
the DB, then I'd suggest taking a look at making/getting a browser based
update form for allowing access to the data (or something similar) rather
than Word (again, I don't know what system this is coming from or any
security restrictions this might have).

HTH (or is at least close to what you want to do),
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Mellen  | Ray Ontko & Co. - Richmond, IN - http://www.ontko.com/
donm@ontko.com |  "In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded"