exporting FM database to word processing document

[bhinton]

I am a commercial real estate appraiser and want to use FM 7 to maintain a database of sale transactions. Each sale is written up as a one page record. Normally, I would need to import these records (typically 4-6 in a report) to a word processing document. I utilize Open Office word processor but could export to Word document and then import that file to Open Office. I need to be able to make the FM part of the word processing document as I have to ultimately convert it to a PDF file.

Any general direction on how I can pull these records into a word processing file would be greatly appreciated.

Byron

[email protected]

[John Mark Osborne]

I would upgrade to FileMaker 8.5 since it has the ability to create a PDF document directly from FileMaker. Then, you could produce these documents with one click of a button.

[bhinton]

John,

Thanks for the suggestion. I am capable of saving FM records now using a PDF driver (ie. CutePDF). However, this requires me to maintain two different files of an editable document, in addtiona to saving as a PDF document. I was hoping to create one self contained file captured in the Open Office word processing file. Some of the data in the records also appears in spreadsheets in the WP file, so that is another reason I wanted to make the FM data part of a single WP file.

Thanks for any suggestion or advice,

Byron.

[jteich]

I have no experience with Open Office, sorry.

When you want to tranfer FileMaker data to MS Word there are different ways.

You could export from FileMaker as text (.csv or .mer) and import in Word.

There are other ways to achieve the data transfer which require special knowledge of either XML-XSLT or VBScript.

-jens

[BobWeaver]

There are at least a couple of ways to do this, but I would probably export the data as an rtf document.

There is a quick and dirty way of doing this using a template document that you create in Open Office. You create the basic document in Open Office, and wherever you want data from Filemaker to appear, put in some sort of placeholder tag such as:

<>

<>

 etc.

 Then save the document in rtf format. Then open the document as plain text and copy all the text. Paste it into a global field (call it 'gTemplate') in your Filemaker database. Create an unstored calculated field (call it 'cExportText').

The formula for cExportText would be:

Substitute(gTemplate;

["<< CustomerName >>";CustomerName];

["<< CustomerAddress >>";CustomerAddress];

. // Put other field data substitutions here

.

.

[¶;"par "]; //convert any line breaks to rtf escaped version

)

The above formula will replace the placeholder tags with the actual field data. Then all you need to do is Export Field Contents (under the edit menu) for the cExportText field. If you give the exported file an .rtf extension, Open Office should be able to open it correctly.

Edited October 19, 2006 by Guest
added code tags because forum doesn't like less/greater than characters

[mlemmnapa]

Use EZxslt from Chapparell sofware. (http://www.chapsoft.com/) that's what I use and it works great.

-Mark Lemm

[email protected]