Microsoft Word (2002)

The EMu reporting facility provides a flexible mechanism for exporting information out of EMu in a wide variety of formats. Although most reports are developed using Crystal Reports, such reports are read-only and this could prove to be a limitation if what is required is a report that can be modified or completed by a user after it has been produced.

For these situations, EMu is designed to interface with Microsoft Word, as reports developed in Word are not read-only and can be modified by the end user as required. It is worth keeping in mind however that Microsoft Word is not a general purpose reporting tool and it does not have the same level of reporting sophistication as Crystal Reports.

In this section we demonstrate how to create a mail merge report in Microsoft Word. This report could be developed in Crystal with perhaps greater ease, however, unlike a Crystal report, the mail merge report we will produce in Word can be edited by the user who runs the report.

The following example builds a Microsoft Word mail merge report to generate a Loan Agreement form. The Loan Agreement document consists of three pieces of information from three different sources:

• Loan information: details of the loan itself, e.g. loan period.
• Party information: details of the person to whom the loan is made, e.g. name, address.
• Object information: details of objects being lent, e.g. object summary.