Exporting Information to Word

All Microsoft Office products can share information in various ways. If you need to move a table or the results of a query to an existing Word document, it is often easiest to simply copy and paste the records from the datasheet. But if you want to work with the contents of the Invoice report in Word, then you need to export the Invoice report.

When you export information from Access 2007 to Word, Access creates a Rich Text Format (RTF) document, which can be opened by Word and various other applications.

In this exercise, you will export a form from a database to an RTF document.

1.	In the Navigation Pane, under Forms, double-click Customers. The Customers form opens in Form view. [View full size image]
2.	On the External Data tab, in the Export group, click the Word button. [View full size image]
3.	In the Export RTF File wizard, click Browse. In the File Save dialog box, navigate to your Documents\MSP\SBS_Access2007\Chapter04 folder, and then click Save.
4.	In the Export RTF File wizard, select the Open the destination file after the export operation is complete check box, and then click OK. Access exports the table to a Word document. Word starts and the document opens. Notice that Word presents the information in a different format than Access, where only one record is displayed at a time. To see all fields on one page in Word, select the header row, then right-click the selection, point to Auto-fit, and click AutoFit to Window.

Exporting Information to PDF and XPS Files You can download an add-in from Microsoft that enables you to export information from 2007 Microsoft Office system applications to Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) files. The export process follows the same steps as exporting to other formats. You are probably familiar with the PDF format developed by Adobe Systems, as it has been around for many years. Information converted to this format should display exactly the same on any computer or operating system. The XPS format is a relatively new one developed by Microsoft to serve a similar purpose. It doesn't yet have the broad support of PDF, but is worth exploring. Because the primary purpose of both formats is to maintain the appearance of the content as it is displayed by various systems, they are good formats to use when publishing reports. Tip The XML Paper Specification describes the XPS Document format. A document in XPS Document format (XPS Document) is a paginated representation of electronic paper described in an XML-based format. The XPS Document format is an open, cross-platform document format that allows customers to effortlessly create, share, print, and archive paginated documents. XPS Documents use a file container that conforms to the Open Packaging Conventions. The 2007 Microsoft Office system also uses the Open Packaging Conventions for organizing data into files, allowing businesses to manage documents from the 2007 Microsoft Office system and XPS Documents in the same manner. You can learn more about XPS and download several XPS viewers by visiting www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/ To view a PDF document, install Adobe Reader from www.adobe.com