What I essentially want is some way to expand my mail merge system. If an account number gets sent to a word document via mail merge, I would like some way for Word to connect to a MySQL database and use that account number to execute additional queries and retrieve information.
For one, I don't see the option in Word to create database connections. Excel has a ribbon tab for data connections, so I tried playing around with it and in typical Microsoft fashion, they seem to have "forgotten" that any non-Microsoft products exist and only let me choose MSQL or Access databases.
I googled for a solution and the only real promising thing I found required full Visual Studio tools, which I don't have (and this is for work so I can't really get by with using the personal free editions).
Is there any way I can manage this? If Word cannot connect directly to a MySQL database, can it do something like execute a perl script that connects to the database and returns query results?
