Re: [wdvltalk] making pretty reports

[Sheila Fenelon]

Once upon a time I got paid to automate the creation of Word docs from 
data dumped into csv files. I actually did it twice for two different 
employers. The first had data that needed to be formatted into tables 
suitable for publication. The second job needed DOCs files created from 
plain text reports. For that one I created a Word app that I pointed at 
a directory of text files. The files had been roughly formatted. The 
Word app read them, one at time, into Word and did some formating for 
page breaks, created tables for data, and added stuff like repeating 
table headings on the next page when the table ran to more than one 
page. I'd start the program running, take a long coffee break and come 
back to 600 formatted Word Docs. It was actually kind of fun to watch 
the computer madly loading files, zipping through them, adding 
formatting and then saving them back to disk.

Anyway the point is that you could automate Excel or Word and have it do 
all the file shuffling needed to create the reports. How are you Basic 
programming skills?

Also, did you know that MySQL can dump data in XML format? That might be 
another avenue to explore.

Sheila
http://www.shefen.com/
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