I am trying to develop a PHP/MySQL solution for someone here that will make their life much much easier.
Basically, this user has a MS Word template for a series of letters that get sent out to employees based on their attendance record (e.g. if they don't show up, they get a warning letter). We call it a "no show". This word template has all the formatting and text needed for the letter, but has mail merge fields that insert things like the date of the incident, employee name, their supervisor, address etc etc. The SOURCE file for this mail merge is simply another Word document with a table in it that holds all the needed fields. She has to look up the employee's information, type it into the SOURCE file field by field, and THEN hit the merge button.
As you can imagine, having to do this 20-25 times a week is not fun.
So I've already setup a PHP/MySQL solution for the user so that all of the required information for each "no show" incident is entered and stored in a MySQL database that also holds employee information. The idea here is, for each no show incident there will be a link next to it where all she has to do is click it and it will open up the letter template word document and automatically insert all of the information (incident date, employee info etc.). Basically, I'm trying to do a mail merge using PHP!
I am pretty good with PHP/MySQL stuff but have never done any integration with Word. I'm hoping you experts here might be able to point my in the right direction!
Thanks