Text recognition question (1 Viewer)

[gledav]

We are a music school and we send student report templates to our teachers for completion each year. They are Access reports generated from a query, converted into PDFs or Word Docs and emailed to them. When the completed PDFs or Docs are returned to us we print them out and post them to parents. This process is expensive and time consuming.

Is there a way for Access to somehow recognise a unique email address or studentID printed on the student report page (PDF or Word Doc) that could be linked back to a query in order to automate a procedure to send the completed reports to parents via email? Or any other way of achieving this?

Please note the teachers do not have MS Access and my current version is 2010 though I would be more than happy to upgrade if later versions have the functionality I require.

Any help or direction would be appreciated.

 

[Gasman]

Yes, very easy.
Have a field that holds the destination email address. Would probably want more details, so you could say 'Good morning Mrs Davies, please see your report for David'

Would probably have a Parent table. As you.might need to send to both or more parents these days.

 

[gledav]

Thanks Gasman, Perhaps I wasn't altogether clear. My question is really about how does Access 'see' the email field or StudentID field in the returned PDFs or Word Docs.

 

[Pat Hartman]

how does Access 'see' the email field or StudentID field in the returned PDFs or Word Docs.

Unless you have some software that can read a PDF like Adobe, it can't. If you use the .rtf format, the Word document is plain text so you would be able to parse it and pull out an email address.

Why is this information not collected at registration? That makes more sense to me. Then when you need to send out emails, the data is there. Your emailing process can send emails when there is an email address and it can print the report when it needs to be mailed.

 

[theDBguy]

Could you add the student id to the name of the file? If so, that could be one way to automatically determine the correct email address.

 

[MarkK]

To me the simplest solution is to put identification data in the filename. Then you don't need to open the file or parse its contents for your MS Access code to triage the file's origin, destination, purpose, etc... Imagine filenames like ...

1234 Johnny_Jones Report_Card.pdf
5678 Suzie_Smith Attendence.docx

That'd be dead simple to manage programmatically.

 

[gledav]

Unless you have some software that can read a PDF like Adobe, it can't. If you use the .rtf format, the Word document is plain text so you would be able to parse it and pull out an email address.

Why is this information not collected at registration? That makes more sense to me. Then when you need to send out emails, the data is there. Your emailing process can send emails when there is an email address and it can print the report when it needs to be mailed.

Hi Pat, Thanks for your reply. I do have the information. I have all the data required to personalise reports such as StudentID, parent email address etc. Any or all of this information can be and is placed on the individualised report templates I send to the teachers for completion. What I need is a way for Access to read that information after the teachers send back the completed reports so I can then email the individual reports to the relevant parents. I guess you have partially answered my question with "If you use the .rtf format, the Word document is plain text so you would be able to parse it and pull out an email address." If I know this is possible then that is all I require. I will seek out a tutorial now on how to achieve this as my programming skills are limited. If you know of any that may be useful I would appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. Otherwise, Thanks for your help as now I know I might be able to achieve what I have been looking for. Kind regards.

 

[Gasman]

You could perhaps use Excel workbook for sending to the teachers and process that. That would be relatively easy.
Then produce an Access report for the parents.

 

[gledav]

Thanks everyone. I appreciate all the advice and it gives me some hope that what I want to do is achievable. Now I know that, I'll explore the different methods that seem to be available and see which one is the best to implement.

 

[Pat Hartman]

The name of the file should include the ID of the student. There is no reason to try to extract information from the text. As @Gasman suggested, Excel is a better tool for passing actual data.