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#1
05-28-2009, 03:46 PM
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Automatically update text changes in word – Word 2007
First – Yes I thoroughly read the other post, followed link to additional post and Downloaded Application Response Letter (Automated v2[1].1).
My situation requires a very different solution. The Situation: I have a few different vendors and contractors that I send bid invitations to. I have a list of 21 common items that gets spread into all bid invitations and various supporting documents. There are several contractors and vendor that require a small list of items that are only pertinent to the trade. There are several trades that only require my common items. What Would I like to happen? I would like to create a table or form to collect the information in one word document. I would like to pass that information to many different word documents. Or in Reverse - I would like many documents to grab the information from the one word document. For each new Job I would like to copy and re-save the entire folder of documents and then fill out the table or form to update all the documents with new information. What have I tried? First – I set up forms in Excel and then (painstakingly) copied each field and did a paste special à past link à Unformatted text and then formatted the text to match the document. I did that to ALL of the documents. What was the result? It worked a couple of times and I thought I had it made. Then it started bugging out. Many of the pages with 30 plus links embedded in them would hang up, give errors or not display the information. What was my next attempt? I copied the forms into word as tables. I thought (wishful thinking) maybe there was a breakdown between excel and word. I then (painstakingly) copied each field and did a paste special à past link à Unformatted text and then formatted the text to match the document. No luck on the first document so here I am. What Am I hoping you can help me with? After reading through several post it is clear you guys know what’s up with word. First I hope you can answer a simple question to a complicated scenario. Is it possible for me to achieve my desired result with Word or do I need to move on? Second if it possible: Can you give me some advice and point me in the right direction to directions or preferably some tutorials. I would prefer to create this myself if it is possible. That way I can tweak or fix as required. Your help is much appreciated. Regards, William 
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#2
05-29-2009, 02:48 PM
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Ok.
I may have half of a solution. I need a few days to work it out. I utilized my original excel table file and the word mail merge feature. In order to work around mail merge deficiencies I created a new tab in excel for the mail merge data. I created a header row and titled each COLUMN. Then I created a row to hold the information from the form input cells. Essentially changing the user input from a column format to row format. This solved the problem that mail merge will not allow you to select an excel column and change the row for each new input into the word document. Mail merge will allow you to check a specific excel row. Once selected you can input any column you want into the page. Now I can maintain the excel form in a proper format for ease of use. Grab the data from one tab to another, formatting it into a row format. Then use mail merge to grab the data from the excel file. I put the excel file in the root folder and tell all the word documents that is the data source location. When I edit the file the documents update. The big pitfall I am trying to work around is the ability to save the folder of files as a new job name in a new folder location. The data bind is looking for an exact location. Ie C:\Documents\folder\file.ext I cannot figure out how to reference it as a local file. What I want to do is tell it to reference the file from the containing folder ..\new folder\file.ext or ..\file.ext. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, William
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Windows XP 
Office 2007
Linear Mode
