Publish with Word (2000/XP/2003)

[Peter_Thesiger]

My client wants to create a report that will subsequently be used in a DTP program to publish his product catalogue. I have created a report and sub report (see attached d/[img]/forums/images/smilies/cool.gif[/img] that in Access looks fine. However whenever it is published in Word as an RTF file the fonts sizes change for the paragraph markers. The font sizes used in the report are Arial 9pt for title and 8pt for text. The paragraph markers vary between 9pt, 10.5pt and 13,5pt. Naturally this is throwing off the formatting of the file. Does anyone have any ideas.

[HansV]

The export to RTF feature is notoriously weak. Microsoft basically hasn't updated it since the earliest versions of Access. Would it be possible to use PDF format instead of RTF? Apart from the "official" and expensive Adobe application, there are free/cheap PDF converters. PDF format is more or less guaranteed to look the same everywhere.

[Peter_Thesiger]

The problem is that there is a fair amound of additional work needed to finalise the document for publication - the addition of alternating footers, additional pages front and back, the inclusion of an index, TOC, etc.

[HansV]

I don't think you can do much about the export to RTF. Perhaps it would be possible to create a macro in Word that cleans up the resulting document and adds some or all of the other features.

Another possibility would be to create the entire document in Word, either as a mail merge (but the subreport complicates that), or using Automation (controlling Word from Access in code). My fellow moderator WendellB has tutorials on both mail merge and automation on his website:
Managing Merges with Access
Automation 101

[Peter_Thesiger]

Many thanks Hans. Given the timing we are going to have go with what we have got and to do a lot of rework in MS Word or Publisher. Even this has saved a lot of effort. Maybe for next year's catalogue I can figure a better way.

Regards

Peter

[johnhutchison]

I don't know whether this is any help, but when I tried exporting your report to RTF using Word 2003 and Access 2003, it preserved your font settings exactly the way they were in the report.

What version are you using? All three?

I don't like the way the subreport gets put in with tabs, but if you are not going to modify the actual text or layout I don't suppose this matters. But if you touched the text at all this stuff could go all over the place.