Help Wanted: Date advancing macro - possible?

[noquarter]

Hello all - I googled this forum up and got registered right away because in reading the various posts, I see a lot of you have way more experience in using MSoft Word than I ever could dream of. I'm hoping that someone could help me out.

For 4 years off and on, I've researched online and queried many a person on how to accomplish this task so here goes:

I work in a rental center that rents out everything from construction equipment to tables for graduation parties. I have made up a simple reservation form where I can put down the person's name, phone number, time, etc.

What I want to be able to do is print off a stack of these form with the date at the bottom but with each form, I need to have the date increment by one day. Is this possible? Ultimately what I would like to do is specify a beginning and ending date and have the computer automatically print however many forms I need based upon one sheet per day. Even better is if I could accomplish this in one pass instead of printing the forms and then running them through a 2nd time to apply the date.

I've been told this is not possible, it is possible, it's easy, it's hard, but as of yet, nobody has been able to back up their words except the nay-sayers who won't even try.

Thanks for the help.

Erin

[jaclaz]

If you can write a simple Vbasic program, it is possible, but I suspect that the way I normally do it is easier.

I have an Excel spreadsheet where a database is kept with all "Fields" connected to a Word "template"

I update the database fields, which can have formulas in them, copying one or more rows and adding them, that I use the "Mail merge" function of Word.

Some reference to get you started:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/mail_merge.html

http://www.its.ipfw.edu/training/howto/mailmerge.shtml

A google search for "mail merge" will give you more results.

Once you have done it "manually" it is quite wasy to make a VBasic macro or function to automate it, but that's all another thing.

jaclaz

[noquarter]

I want to thank you for the suggestion of using the Mail Merge function. Up until now, I've never heard of such a thing and it appears that for now, it's the only way to do it aside from totally writing a custom program to do the work. I'm going to investigate this further and see what can be done. I'll keep y'all posted on the results.

Erin

[Anne Troy]

This can most certainly be done, Erin. I had a programmer write a program to create shipping labels. Sometimes, the people would ship 20 packages, or 100. They needed a label for each package, and they needed them marked as 1 of 75, 2 of 75, or whatever. When you opened the Excel file, you filled in the address and the start at and the end at, and the total number of packages, and hit print. Voila!

That sounds even harder than what you need. Do you have sample files I can work with?

[noquarter]

Hey Anne - thanks for the reply! The only files I have to work with are the original pages I designed which is nothing more than a plain old reservation sheet. What I would do is print off the sheets, then run them through the printer a 2nd time with a calendar printed on the bottom. Then I would have to go through each page and circle the day. So really all I would need is some kind of a form that prints within MSWord or MSWorks which would automatically print the "automatically advancing date" at the bottom. It could be a totally blank page aside from this for all I care. Then I would assume it would be as simple as pasting in the document I want to have printed. Does this all kind of make sense sorta kinda? :-)

Erin