Form...

[Justin27]

I am working on a HTML Form for a friend of mine right now. Here is what the problem is: He has a newsletter that right now the information for it is being sent to via e-mail. What he would like is a HTML form that the person can fill out and then like hit a publish button and have it published to his home site where he can post it after he has make formating changes, or the guy can just print it off. He has a word template for the newsletter that he sent to me. I have created a form but I think I am going about it wrong. He wants the functionality of a form with drop down menus and text boxs but the formatability of word. I am not sure what to do now. Is there a way that the form that I designed can be setup to throw the HTML form information onto the word template so he can edit it. I have not completed the form totally it is not setup with submit buttons or anything yet because I was not sure where to go. Or if I should just scrap it and start from scratch. I will attach the code I have so far the word template looks just like it only it is a template. Any help would be highly appreciated.

[QuietDean]

Hi there.

Word has a facilility called 'Mai Merge'. It allows you take to information (like from a text file, or database) and 'merge' this info into a Word template.

This can only be done by the user of Word, but what you can do is make sure that the way you provide the information is auseable to Word.

have a play with word yourself, I do not know off hand a good format for mail merge, But I think it will accept csv (Comma Separated Values) files.

So if you can send the form to a script which adds the info to a csv file, he should be able to mail merge 'everyone' at once into the Word template.

Have fun, let us know how you get on.

[Justin27]

Can you use a HTML form in a mail merge? Also he wants to take it and post the form/newsletter to his website after he has formated it rather than mail it out I see where you are going with it but maybe I'm not seeing everything because I'm not sure how a .csv file works.

[QuietDean]

Ah. The impression I got was that he wanted the info for his word template, to use for whatever.

There is no point merging it with word, then converting back to HTML.

I suggest having a look around www.hotscripts.com to see if you can find anything that will do what you need. Look under 'Form Processing'. You can get form processers that write informayion to a file/database, you can then use a template to decide how you are going to display them.

I would throw the MSWord document out the window. An ASP script/COM Object could probably write direct to a word doc, but that would be horrifically complicated.

Here is the process of how I would handle this -

Form submits to form processor, which writes to a file the information.

A Separate display script which makes the Information 'Pretty', in the format of your template.

All these are avaialable from hotscripts.

[Justin27]

Thanks for the information I will check it out and let you know.

[Doorknob]

using asp to write to word.doc isnt 'horrifically complicated'. lol =)