Just a few questions left.....

[gbrown]

I'm new to FM and I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and s**t FMP for the last three weeks. I bought videos, books, used this forum, and have a list of bookmarks a mile long. I'm now down to just a few questions remaining (until I start building! LOL) With regards to plug-ins:

First and foremost on my mind is integration with MS Word. If you're developing for business users Word and Outlook are a must. Some of the developers here must have run into this before. Using FMP layouts for business letter/email templates is very limiting, plus you have all the printing issues since users all have different printers, page layout,etc. I've been looking for a solution and got excited when FMI announced the integration kit for Office at MacWorld. I don't mean to bash FMI because I think their product is very good but... I would have been embarrassed to announce something like this - integration via export/import?: Talk about early 90's technology!

So far I have only found two ideas to do this - a plug-in called Wordconnector from a company in Germany (gb Pro) http://www.gbpro.de/products/wc_plugin/details_en.html, and an Xslt program called EZxslt - http://www.chapsoft.com/ezxslt/index.html?. Ezxslt looks really cool and may have a lot of uses other than Word but I can't expect my users to convert their Word templates before they can use them. Wordconnector may work but it is fairly pricey especially considering the exchange rate.

Any ideas?

Second, I have found solutions that don't need a plug-in for quite a few of the things thought I would need one for but at this point I will still need three to four plug-ins. If I test well and use an installer package is three to four plug-ins going to cause a problem? I ask because many people say that you shouldn't use plug-ins in distributed solutions.

Thanks for your help.

Greg

[Genx]

You can use ODBC to connect MS and FM...

[gbrown]

Ok, I like the ODBC idea because it is one less plug-in but... I read up on this and from what I can see you need to install the ODBC driver. Not that much of a problem if the installer package can do it. But it also looks like you need to configure the ODBC driver/DSN on each client machine. Is this the case? If so this won't work for a distributed solution.

Thanks

Greg

[Genx]

You could probably use a vbscript or a batch file to configure the driver

[Genx]

Out of curiousity, why do you want to interact with MS?

[XOR]

Hi Greg,

About MS Word integration: basicly you don't need a plug-in to perform a MS Word Mailmerge using data from FileMaker.

The method that I frequently use is VBA executing from FileMaker:

1. Export data as Merge File (.mer)

2. Open MS Word template

3. Send DDE Execute (Windows) or Perform AppleScript "do visual basic" (Mac), something like:

[MailMergeOpenDataSource .Name = "C:Tempdata.mer"]

[MailMergeViewData]

You can download a WordBasic manual at: http://www.angelfire.com/biz/rhaminisys/binaries/wrdbasic.exe.

Kind regards,

Mark

[gbrown]

Thanks Mark I will check that out as a possible solution!

Genx- My solution is an SFA (sales) program and will need to generate sales letters, emails, and faxes. I want to integrate with Word for two reasons. First, Word obviously has many more text and page layout features than does FMP. Second, business users are used to using Word and therefore can integrate FMP with doc's they may already have plus they already know how to use Word - less training on my part. I want to have pre-built templates for the above items but I also want the ability for my users to build their own.

Greg

[XOR]

You're welcome.

When you use DDE with MS Word, enter the following settings:

Service Name: winword

Topic: system

Commands: your VBA code

And don't forget to use brackets at the beginning and end at each line of code...