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Have you ever wanted to get data from your FileMaker database directly into an MS Word document?  Doing so isn’t all that difficult (though it will involve a bit of programming).  If you follow this example, you won’t need any third party plugins, you’ll get to build your template file within MS Word, and you don’t even have to go through any confusing merge fields wizards in MS Word either.  The Write To Word – Example Files that I’m providing will work only on the Windows platform, although similar steps should be possible on the OSX platform using AppleScript.

Basically this process entails a glorified search and replace that’s being initiated from within a FileMaker Pro script.  You start off using a .dotx file (A MS Word Document Template).  My example template looks like this:

Before

After you’ve run the FileMaker Pro script, it will search and replace the appropriate text, so you end up with something that looks like this:

After

I took advantage of a very old technology known as DDE to get this to work.  FileMaker (on Windows) has a Script Step called “Send DDE Execute” which takes a few parameters:

1. Service Name –> here you type in the name of the DDE Server –> in this case “winword”
2. Topic –> this is typically the name of the file that you’re going to interact with –> in this case we’ll use “system” which will basically tell WinWord to use whichever file is currently open (normally not a good idea, but you’ll see in the next step that we’re going to be opening a new document anyway)
3. Commands –> this is where the meat and potatoes of the routine are to be found.  Here we tell WinWord that we want to use the .dotx template file in order to create a new document within Word, and once that’s been created, we do our search and replace.  Details of this can be found in the codebox below

Code for Auto-Enter Calculation

"[FileNew.Template =\"" & $templatePath & "\"]" &
"[EditReplace.Find=\"<<firstName>>\",.Replace=\"" & WriteToWord::nameFirst & "\",.ReplaceAll,.Wrap=1]" &
"[EditReplace.Find=\"<<lastName>>\",.Replace=\"" & WriteToWord::nameLast & "\",.ReplaceAll,.Wrap=1]"

Once all the pieces are intact, the process of getting this to work is very simple, but there are a few steps you’ll need to follow.  Here’s how you can get my Write To Word – Example Files working for you:

1. Save my “FileMaker.dotx” file to your “My Documents” folder
2. Open MS Word (no need to have any Word Documents open though)
3. Open my “WriteToWord.fp7″ file
4. Specify the “First Name” and “Last Name” that you desire to appear within your new Word Document
5. Click the “Write To File” button

You should now have a Word document that looks much like the “After” image depicted above.  Have you got any novel uses for the “Send DDE Execute” step?  If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using it.  I think it’s going to be a big time saver for me, and might radically change the way that I design parts of my systems.

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