VBA with MS Word and Excel 2000

Good day ladies and gentlemen... Im glad to be here at majorGeeks.com. I'll cut to the chase. I am a web developer. I have some very slight experience with programming. Not enough to claim the name programmer. I am in a bit of a pickle. I have been tasked with making Word, Outlook, and Excel (or Access, whichever is easier) talk to each other and work together. I know that I will need to use VBA. But like I said, I dont know programming very well... this is how the flow of the project should work:
There is a document, lets call it report.doc, that contains a form with some fields that a user will fill in using drop boxes and text fields. The user will then click a sumbit button and this will cause report.doc and the information that was input to be saved as a new document and then emailed to a set email account. The monitor of this email account will then view report.doc and assign a "class" to the report, which I am wanting to be a new drop down list viewable by only this user. He will then click a new submit button and the information will be entered into either access or excel...
This is all how I would like it to work in theory. I could easily do this with ASP, javascript, and SQL but the requestor of this project has been so "attached" to his little word doc that they refuse to let it go...
so... please HELP ME!! any advice is greatly appreciated
-JPDawg24

 

gadzoox

if you have only 'slight' programming experience, then this may be beyond your capabilities, even with some help....

what i would do, is write the form in Access. the user would enter the information and the form would save it in the database. then you could mailmerge and email any data you wanted with Automation.

however, this is all pretty advanced VBA programming, and would take a fair amount of work.

on the other hand, there are probably much simpler ways of doing this without having to code them.

other people that are more versed in VBA for Word and Outlook would probably have better strategies for this particular problem than I do.

 

so let me get this straight.. this form is in the word document? and the form on the word document submits? ugh!!

Do you have a mail server or an open SMTP relay that you can send the mail through? Otherwise, you'll need outlook on the machine and you'll get a security warning prompt every time an email is sent via scripting. I would try to avoid using Outlook as your medium for sending mail because it can be a hassle.

I agree with mango man on using Access as your form instead of using word. This way you can store the data too. Now, I have one question about the "class" assignment.. how do you intend to "mark" this and then query for the fact that it is secured by a certain user only?

 

i would say its probably easiest to just use the File->Send To->Mail Recipient feature, rather than trying to automate the whole emailing process...

 

office 2003 has tracking features I believe.. Im not truly clear on the whole process here..