On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 4:08 PM, Kurt Wendt Kurt_Wendt@globetax.com wrote:
Any thoughts on this??
Thoughts? Boy, are you in trouble!
Okay, so [NF] means Not Fox, so you don't want to hear about the 42 ways to do this in VFP. The CodePlex code may be worth trying out; some of the people on their forum report it works for them.
It seems to me you're looking at the classic IT conundrum: Fast, cheap, accurate: pick two. If you want it fast and accurate, it won't be cheap. If you want it cheap and accurate, it won't get done fast. If you want it cheap and fast, it won't be accurate. And IIRC, your employer is big on cheap. And fast. So...
Otherwise, you're looking at a specialized tool. Years ago, I worked with a client that used OmniForm (now from ScanSoft) to mail merge their internal data onto government-supplied forms. ScanSoft may have a solution for you, although I'm not familiar with their current product lines.
Adobe are the people who invented PDF, and likely have some tools that would work for you. If this truly is a one-off job, and not a "we'll ask you to do this every 6 months, as an emergency," it might be cheaper to search for an Adobe professional who could bang this out. Searching online, it seems like a lot of Adobe products can mail merge via ODBC, which is likely what you want.
Random surfing turned up: https://www.evermap.com/automailmerge.asp, no idea if it works, but $149 is reasonable.
I thought there was a way to do this using CutePDFPro; I've used it to create the data-fillable PDF form templates, but I don't see a solution that includes merge-from-database.
Good luck!