It might not be that hard to redesign your report to handle all your content. Just moving the objects to a new layout is easy; you can shift-doubleclick on a band to grab all the objects in a band, copy and paste into a new object.

The thing that will make this "hard" or "easy" is going to be the data structures and scopes you need for each report. If these remain relatively the same for each of the separate reports, you can probably do this easily; multiple detail bands in 9 may help. but it all depends on how related these various report runs are, in terms of scope and data.

Another thing that would make it difficult is different page sizes for the report. A single report run (regardless of NOPAGEEJECT) is sending one set of printer instructions up-front. By contrast, Word has document sections, each of which can have its own printer instructions.

In 9 you could take the XML output of VFP and transform it to Word XML. This would give you a chance to basically omit what we call the "formatting bands" -- the page header and footer type stuff, and column headers and footers if used -- because they'll be irrelevant to the new page breaks -- and just dump the data content, complete with positioning and, yes, pictures, directly into Word.

You can also poke the information directly into Word during a report run, using automation. Although I've been doing this for a long time, not until VFP 9 could you do this without including some extra objects (at least) in the FRX to help you along. In 9, you can do this with a report listener, it's a lot easier.

Even so, neither the automation nor the XML transform is easy to do if you've never done it before <s>. If this is important to your user, IMHO you should talk to the commercial vendors and give them your exact requirement, find out who fulfills it. There are a number of commercial tools (which are being updated to use VFP 9's features) available to do the type of conversion you're talking about (reports to Word).

One other thing you'll need to watch out for, even if you use a commercial tool: you say you don't want to redesign the reports. However, notice what I said about "formatting bands" in the last couple of paragraphs. If you used (say) page footers to contain meaningful information in your report, such as group totals you want to appear at the bottom of the page, I guarantee you that you will have to re-design, at least somewhat.

You need to think only of the "content bands" when designing a report that has to work properly in an "un-paged environment", which basically is what you're looking for. Yes, I know that Word has pages and page headers and footers, but the page breaks will be at different places, even with the same page size. Content relevant to the current record can't be just arbitrarily ported there.

>L<