Hi Rick,
IMHO VFP report writer is powerfull that you can do many things with it. It's fast and always available with FP.
Of course there is the other side of coin. VFP report writer capabilities are limited to a point and even forcing that limit, is not only needing high skills but cumbersome as well even for the developer. In my apps I always have a need to keep doors open for a report that's not "predetermined", or change layout of a report etc. Doing this is one of the things I hate much. So I think users should be capable of designing their own.
They all know (or I think they do) using the MSWord and other MSOffice products ( at least feel themselves comfortable with those - or can't dare to confess they don't know using word ?). This is like promotion, but reality, what I can do :)
With a query maker interface the needed SQL could be build and so report modification is left. Well FP supports on the fly report creation and modification, but even myself find it quite hard to work with limited tools of report designer how would I succeed to teach it to a user.
And so brilliant porting to word idea kicks in here :) If I could teach them using a QBF interface teaching merge field insertion should be a breeze :) And yes they do learn it quickly (to my surprise:). Now that I know how to export (really?) bmp files too, theoritically I can do everything that VFP report designer could do (?) plus some it can't do. With word's command set a report could be built and formatted on the fly, charting from Excel inserted to it and printed in the background resembling a "report form ... to printer noconsole" and the result, I should admit, is better than VFP report writer.
As final word :
-Do as much as you can do (predetermined reports) in VFP.
-Have an mmerge option for the rest.
PS: it was cSQLStatement causing the error in class as I could find. Updated class and correction mails should have reached you but I'm not sure for my mail server is punning on me.
Cetin


>Cetin, I'm looking into mail merge options and I found the message below in the UT archives that you replied to someone. I think you bring up a good point here. Is there anything you can't do by using the report form method. To me this sounds like the easiest way to do this but it seems like there would be a catch somewhere because so many people are choosing to do this through MS Word instead of a report form. Your comments?
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>-Rick
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>>>I have a mail merge operation I use in my app that uses a memo field to store the text of my letter. I also use substitution variables in this text thst are located within a calling program and replaced with appropriate field values. Although this works quite well, I cannot use any text formatting such as bolding a word or changing font size for a phrase etc. If I change the memo field text to bold, the entire document becomes bold. There is no way to format just a portion of the memo field. Does anyone out there have a mail merge operation that doesn't use a seperate word processor application. I would like to do everything inside VFP if possible. Any suggestions/Tips are appreciated. Thanks!
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>>I think this could be done entirely with a report form. -Cetin