Linked Excel/Word Template?

Hey there,



I was wondering what the best practice is for dynamically linking certain tables from an Excel book to a Word doc, then copying both the Excel book and Word doc to new files, while maintaining the links between the two.



For example, I need to generate reports for technical studies. The reports are generally similar to one another, except for the data. I have Excel book templates to do the calculations, so I want to keep a report template Word doc, so when I start a new project, I can just copy over the Excel and Word docs to a new folder, rename at least the Word doc, update the inputs to the excel sheet and have it spit out the output tables in the report. I've been testing it out and it seems a bit messy. If I leave the Excel workbook name the same, I get caught in an infinite loop of "Excel can't have two workbooks with the same name open" even when the previous book is closed. If I rename it, then change all the link sources together, it updates the source book but forgets which tables were linked.



Anyone have success with this? Thanks!

This sounds like a mail merge. If you use your Excel workbook to get the results of a study and the values you want to use in Word can be made available through a table of values where each row corresponds to a particular study, then mail merge is indicated.

Assuming the assumptions are met, use the following steps:
1) Use a new Excel sheet ('Data') and transfer to a table the values you want to use in word. The table headers will be the word fields that you will include in the Word report.
2) Use a Word document with the desired template.
3) In Word use Mailing to link this file to the Excel file, indicating the 'Data' sheet that contains the table created in 1)
4) Enter the fields that option 3) provided.

I hope this helps you.
Note: The number of fields you can call this way is limited (I assume 256 to register/study).