Using a webservice for mail merge in Word

[Jos]

Is it possible to consume a webservice from within Word (2000 or XP)
in order to perform a mail merge?

The problem is: we are moving our Access database online, but we
don't want to lose the mail merge functionality.
I guess this is a common scenario, but I couldn't find any references
through Google.

 

[Matthew Holton]

Cindy,

That was a negative approach, the answer is 'yes with a
catch'.

Jos,

Cindy is correct that you will need to have a file or
ODBC source to reference. You can simply create an temp
file that is a CSV.

Option #1.

Create the temp csv and use Office Automation of Word to
perform your mailmerge. Remember to clean up the temp
file.

Option #2.

On your web server, create verbs for the .csv extension
and have your Word document use http:\\mydata.csv for the
datasource. The mydata.csv is actually an ASP page that
response.writes the data in CSV format. You could make
this a wrapper page that accepts paramaters for different
queries. The wrapper page then consumes the webservice
get the appropriate results.

HTH,


Matthew Holton