Use microsoft word as a database

The Problem:

The genius who flew this desk before me created our sales database in a Word table. It’s huge, it’s ugly, and it doesn’t exactly run like a gazelle. I’m not an Access expert, but I kinda suspect that using a database program might be a better choice than using a word processor. Unfortunately, that means it’s up to me to shunt the Word table into Access.

The Solution:

Unless the table is really ugly, you can probably transfer its contents to Access without too many hairs going gray. Follow these general steps:

Move Data from an Access Table to a Word Document

The Problem:

I need to use some data from an Access table in a Word document. I’ve tried selecting rows and then copying and pasting the data, but I don’t usually want full rows, and Word seems to give me different formatting each time I paste data from Access, anyway.

The Solution:

For more consistent results, export the entire table in a format that Word can read easily, open the resulting file in Word, and copy the parts you need to your document.

To export from Access, open the table, choose File » Export and select the appropriate format in the «Save as type» drop-down list: Rich Text Format if you want all the formatting in the Access table, or Microsoft Word Merge if you want only the text without any formatting. The former creates an actual table in the document, while the latter creates tab-delimited text that you can easily convert back into a table using Word’s Table » Convert » Text to Table command.

In Word, choose File » Open, select Rich Text Format or Text Files in the «Files of type» drop-down list, and then open the file you saved. Copy the appropriate parts of the table or text, and paste them into the Word document that needs them.

by updated Aug 01, 2016

I am doing some research on minerals for a book. I will eventually need to track about two thousand minerals. This is currently done by a ~800 line Word table where each line more or less looks like this picture

The functionality I need is (a) to be able to sort the table on any set of columns (b) see the visual thumbnail for each line (c) but maintain a full resolution copy of the image (d) and be able to click on any active links in the table entry.

Currently the Word file is ~600MB in size and Word (Office 365 version) is clearly beginning to creak at the seams (the autosave no longer works, for example, and sometimes I am unable to select anything in the document.)

I currently run a python program that reads the Word file and produces a .pdf file because the output I need is to map each line of the table to one output page, with picture, notes, and other attributes appropriately scaled and positioned. The .pdf file is about ~2GB in size, so I run it through a .pdf file shrinker afterwards and get a reasonable ~200MB final output.

So my question is, is there a better way to do this? I did take a quick look at Access, and was unable to figure out how to get it to handle the pictures.

I can’t really split the Word file in two because I’d lose the sort functionality. While it’s true that once the table is finished, I would not need to sort it any more, I am continuing to add entries to the table still and the sorting allows me to check for several different error types.

So, is there a flag I can set in Word to allow «large» files safely? If so, then is there a way to have the same functionality but have one mineral per page, nicely formatted with appropriate styles? If not, should I switch to some other document software? (Note: I originally had this in Google Docs but that doesn’t offer the Sort functionality. Add-ons kind of offered sort but each one broke in one way or another on a much smaller table.)

• Download source code — 126 KB
• Download documentation — 757 KB

Introduction

Office Business Applications (OBA) can be a powerful way to surface data for your users. Because nearly every worker uses Microsoft Office, your users are already familiar with the user interface. But how do you bring the data from your line of business (LOB) application into Word? In this lab, you will walk through the steps to bring data into a Word document and provide a Fluent Ribbon user interface to browse that data.

This lab is in two sequential parts. First, you will bind controls in a Word document to a data source. Next, you will customize the Ribbon with buttons to view the data.

Background

This demo assumes you have the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 or later.
• Windows Vista.
• Microsoft Office 2007.

You can use other versions of Visual Studio with Visual Studio Tools for Office installed. But Word Content Controls are a feature of Microsoft Office 2007. This demo will also work on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 with minor changes in how you start Visual Studio.

This article assumes you have a database in Access. But you can connect the Word Content Controls to SQL Server or to data objects or Web Services. You can use the database provided in the code or build your own.

While this lab uses C#, you can adapt this lab to Visual Basic .NET with minor changes.

Using the code

Most of this article is about how to drag and drop the controls and how a few lines of code will build a powerful application in Word.

Create a document with controls bound to a database

In this lab, you use the drag and drop functionality to add controls to a Word 2007 template and add simple data binding to a local database.

First, you will create a solution that includes a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project. This template will allow your users to customize the Word template by selecting the content of predefined areas, based on the data in the database. While this demo is in C#, you can also use Visual Basic. The objective of this process is to open a Word template within Visual Studio.

1. Click Start, type Visual Studio 2008 in the start search textbox, right-click Visual Studio 2008, click Run as administrator
2. Click Continue in the User Account Control dialog
3. Click the File —> New —> Project… menu
4. In the New Project dialog Project types panel, expand Visual C#, expand Office, click 2007
5. In the Templates panel, click Word Template
6. Set the location to your Visual Studio 2008 project folder, such as C:UsersbruceDocumentsVisual Studio 2008Projects
7. Type CCTemplate in the Name textbox
8. Check Create directory for Solution
9. Click OK
10. In the Visual Studio Tools for Office Project Wizard, click OK
11. A dialog box appears that asks if you want access to Visual Basic for Applications
12. Click OK

The Visual Studio Toolbox contains Word Controls. You can now add controls to the document.

1. If the toolbox is not displayed, click View —> Toolbox
2. Expand Word Controls
3. Click on the document
4. Type Company Name followed by a space and drag a RichTextContentControl from the toolbox to the document; press Enter
5. Type Company Address followed by a space and drag a RichTextContentControl from the toolbox to the document; press Enter
6. Type Invitation Date followed by a space and drag a DatePickerControl from the toolbox to the document; press Enter
7. Click the Save disk icon in the document pane

You can adjust the properties of the control.

1. Click the RichTextContentControl that follows the Company Name text
2. Press F5 to run your solution
3. Click on each of the controls and type some data
4. Close the document without saving

You have added controls that when bound to the data browse event handlers, will allow a user to browse a company database.

You can now reference a specific database and bind the controls to that database.

Create a database in Microsoft Office Access. Create a database named CompanyDatabase with a table named CompanyInfo with four columns:

• ID AutoNumber
• CompanyName Text
• CompanyAddress Text
• InvitationDate DateTime

Enter some data in the database. Save the database in a known location, not necessarily in the project.

Next, you can bind the Word Content Controls to a database, as you will do in this example, or you can bind them to a Web Service or an object.

1. Click Data —> Add New Data Source…
2. Click Database in the Data Source Configuration Wizard
3. Click Next>
4. In the Choose Your Connection panel, click New Connection…
5. In the Add Connection dialog, set the items as follows:
• Data Source: Microsoft Access Database File (OLE DB)
• Database file name to the location of your Access database
6. Click OK
7. In the Choose Your Connection panel of the Data Source Configuration Wizard, click Next>
8. When asked if you want to add the database to your solution, click Yes
9. In the Save the Connection String to the Application Configuration File panel, check Yes, Save the connection as and keep the default connection string; click Next>
10. In the Choose Your Database Objects, expand Tables, check CompanyInfo
11. Click Finish

Visual Studio automatically creates a dataset, table adapter, and a binding source. You will use these elements to bind your controls to the data and to manipulate the records in the database.

Next, bind the data to the specific controls. Use the DataBinding property in the Properties pane. Click the Text property and select the specific database record you want to associate with the content controls. You can also drag the specific data elements from the DataSources panel and drop them on the control.

1. Make the property pane visible by clicking the Properties tab
2. Click the RichTextContentControl next to the Company Name text in the Properties panel
3. Expand the (DataBindings) property
4. Expand companyInfoBindingSource
5. Click CompanyName
6. If the Data Sources pane is not visible, click Data —> Show Data Sources
7. In the Data Sources pane, expand CompanyDatabaseDataSet
8. Expand CompanyInfo
9. Click CompanyAddress and drag it to the RichTextContentControl next to the Company Address text in the document panel; the cursor will change to a plus and the control will be highlighted when you can drop the data source onto the control
10. Click Build —> Build Solution

Create data browse buttons for the Word Ribbon

Next, customize the Ribbon in Word with two buttons, a Next and a Previous button, for your user to browse data. Then, you add event handlers to each of the buttons.

The Ribbon Designer includes a visual designer and an extensibility object model. Office callbacks are mapped to the events on the VSTO Ribbon objects, so developers write event handlers instead of callback methods.

1. In Solution Explorer, right-click the CCTemplate project. Click Add —> New Item…
2. In the Add New Item dialog, click Ribbon (Visual Designer) in the Templates panel
3. Type CCRibbon for the Name
4. Click Add

You set properties of the ribbon in the Properties pane and drag and drop ribbon controls from the Office Ribbon Controls tab of the toolbox onto the ribbon.

1. Click the Properties tab to make the Properties pane visible
2. Click TabAddIns (Built-In)
3. In the Label property, type Company Info
4. Click group1 in the CCRibbon.cs ribbon designer
5. In the Label property, type Browse Data
6. Expand Office Ribbon Controls in the Toolbox if it isn’t already expanded
7. Drag Button from the Toolbox to the Browse Data box
8. In the (Name) property, type btnNext
9. In the Label property, type Next
10. Drag Button from the Toolbox to the Browse Data box
11. In the (Name) property, type btnPrevious
12. In the Label property, type Previous

You can add icons by creating an icon and adding each one to the Resources.resx file that is part of the solution. Then, set the Image property by importing images from the resource file. Set the ShowImage property to true.

When you double-click the button in the Ribbon Designer, the code view for the Ribbon opens and enables you to add the event handler code. Use the Globals object to access the document to access the binding source for the company database.

1. Double-click the Next button.
2. Insert this code into the method that is created.

Globals.ThisDocument.companyInfoBindingSource.MoveNext();

3. Double-click the Previous button.
4. Insert this code into the method that is created.

Globals.ThisDocument.companyInfoBindingSource.MovePrevious();

Now run the solution.

1. Press F5
2. Click the Company Data tab to view the Ribbon buttons that you created
3. Click Next to view the next record
4. Click Previous to view the previous record
5. Close the document without saving

Points of interest

You can do a lot with Office Business Applications using very little code.

You have seen how you can browse data in a database or Web Service by binding Word 2007 Content Controls to a data source. You also added a panel in the Word Ribbon bar.

Next steps

Next, you’ll want to deploy your document. For more information on the various ways for deployment, see How to: Deploy Office Solutions. You will probably choose the Publish Wizard. For more information on the Publish Wizard, see How to: Deploy Solution Files Using the Publish Wizard.

Conclusion

Special thanks to Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs for their article: Office UI: New VSTO features help you customize Word And Outlook.

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