Local group [club] membership renewal by email, not post?

[John O'Malvern]

Until now the database generates a report of one A4 sheet per member which is ('printed' to pdf, and then) sent to someone else to print on paper. Some members require more than one different forms. (If the email process will work, then it won't matter that some members get unneccessary forms, everyone can get everything, and ignore what they don't need!)
The 2-4 sheets of paper have then been sent out by mail, so postage costs.
I'm hoping to do it all by email in December. I see there is help to generate emails with (as I understand it) individual pages from Access reports (e.g.) attached, e.g. to individuals (codekabinett.com/rdumps.php?Lang=2&targetDoc=send-email-access-vba-cdo and related webpages )
I would also like to send an image of a membership card, which presumably can be made as an Access report (so including the individual's Memb No and details, etc, as needed) my intention being that it can be downloaded onto a smart phone, and stored on the home page, to be clicked/tapped on to appear for showing when neccessary.
My problem (so far!) is i'm not sure how to go about this. Will the emailing techniques referred to send individual pages of a report to the appropriate recipients (I assume that is what it is there for) but does it need to go through a print to pdf stage before mailing out?
I would really appreciate being given a stage by stage overview of the process of setting up my system to do this. (I do have the full Outlook on my pc, so that's good, if needed.)
NB I'm not a programmer. I could copy and paste some code, obviously, and probably change some labels or variables for mine successfully. Otherwise I'm back to clicking my way through generating a macro.
Any help greatly appreciated.
John

 

[The_Doc_Man]

E-mail sent using VBA to select a single page from a multi-page report might be trickier and more tedious than generating multiple one-page reports and sending them individually. It is more logical in the sense that it approaches the problem with a "divide and conquer" method.

Build a loop that goes through the intended recipients one person at a time.

For each person, open the report using a filter that limits it to the data for a single person.

You have a choice here:

- If the format of the Access report is acceptable, you could use the direct .SendTo option to send the mail.
- Your choice of e-mail client software may figure into this choice, since the SendTo action has to know how to diddle with the e-mail client. You can do this direct e-mail easily with Outlook as your client. Not sure about other clients but I know the ability is not uniform. We have had a few other threads where manual message creation was required because .SendTo couldn't send what it could capture.
- If you are dead-set on sending a PDF then you first have to save the report to a file in PDF format after which you can send the file as a minimum explanatory message plus an attachment of the PDF document.

Whichever way you decide to go, just test it before committing to it.