It’s a hard day at work digging out after having been off on Friday. I spend much of the day messing with committee rosters.<\/p>\n
Our database has any number of reports that produce rosters, but the assistant to the executive director wants a report in Microsoft Word format. Now that’s a harder thing to do.<\/p>\n
Our database application TIMSS uses Crystal Reports as its reporting service. Crystal features its own viewer, from which you can also print. The viewer also will export to a number of formats, Microsoft Word included. So you’d think that’d solve my problem, right? Oh, no.<\/p>\n
She wants the resulting Word document to be editable. Crystal exports to Word using frames, which are really not very friendly to editing. I mean, they are editable in and of themselves, but they are placed on the page more as vector objects rather than flowing text. Plus Crystal seems to separate each page with a section break. So, while the document is in fact open-able by Microsoft Word, it’s not especially use-able by Microsoft Word.<\/p>\n
So I had been working on getting Crystal to export to an Excel record format and then using those Excel records as the data for a merge in Word, but she found that whole process too cumbersome. And so today I was trying, at the suggestion of the business analyst at our software vendor, merging into Word directly from the database application from a query result set.<\/p>\n
It does work. I’m not sure if the executive office will like it, but I think it’s pretty handy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a hard day at work digging out after having been off on Friday. I spend much of the day messing with committee rosters. Our database has any number of reports that produce rosters, but the assistant to the executive director wants a report in Microsoft Word format. Now that’s a harder thing to do. … Continue reading Back to Work<\/span>