Two Access fields into Word without delimitation

Question

I have two fields in Access, FN and LN that need to be converted to word without being separated by anything except a space. For instance, John in FN and Doe in LN should appear as John Doe, rather than 2 columns. However it goes beyond that. I have about 700 names like that that need to appear that way in word, but between each full name, I need a comma, and then a continued string. In other words, if I have columns like this:

John     Doe
Jane     Doe
Chris    Doe
Amy      Doe

They need to end up like this:

John Doe, Jane Doe, Chris Doe, Amy Doe

They need to wrap if the string gets too long because these need to go in a report. Could even possibly be done in Excel and copied to Word, but the end result is this needs to be in a text format.

Any suggestions? Thanks for any help you can give. Please note: I don't know VB so if the solution involves VB I would need very simple step by step instructions.

Also, is there any way to automate this process? I need to create this whole process for an end user so that it automatically does it per her request rather than her having to learn how to use Access, Excel, Word... whatever. I create databases with menus so that end users only have to click a menu item to accomplish whatever task they're needing since they know practically nothing about Access or about programming.

Answer 1

Don't know what version of Word and Access you are using, so specifics may be a bit different.

You can use the Mail Merge feature of Word to create a directory of those names. This will allow you to select which names to import and how to lay it out. There are options to create letters, envelopes, label and directories. You will want the directory option to get them all on the same page.

Open a new document, from the Mailing Tab use select recipients to choose an existing list. This will give you a file open dialog box. Find your database and select the table with the names. Now choose the merge fields dropdown and choose FN to insert it. Do the same for LN with a space between. Add a comma and a space to the end.

Your layout will look like this (with a space after the comma):

<<FN>> <<LN>>,

When finished you should get a list of full names in paragraph format. You can cut and past this into your document.

If you need detailed instructions how to use mail merge, here is a walk through.

Answer 2

I figured this one out for myself. In Access, I selected the records I wanted, then simply did a copy. I also wrote a macro in word (and created a menu button for it) that when clicked, pastes those records into Word, then does some Find and Replace commands and it's done.

So, the End User has to only run the macro I used in Access to open the selected records, then open Word and run the Word macro by clicking the button on the menu bar.

Pretty simple and quick method for the user.