MS Office Automation Etc

[Plotloss]

Hello chaps,

Got a bit of time on my hands and am bored of not coding (terrible I know) and have turned my hand to 'er indoors business and have a couple of questions.

Is there any way in Word to open a document, highlight some text, name it and refer/import it into another document? Requirement here is she gets CV's from candidates that need to be rewritten, its labourious as you can imagine and I want to cut the admin time here and this is the only way I can think of automating a portion of it.

Secondly she has Outlook as an email client. When she is in the office thats fine, when we go away she takes the laptop and connects to the web via a 3G modem. Is there anyway of keeping the folders on the laptop outlook instance synchronised with the folders on the desktop outlook instance? I havent bothered installing exchange on the server so this would be a peer to peer syncronisation in normal terms.

Any thoughts?

[chris.mapey]

With regard to the second bit, have a look at Sproqit (www.sproqit.com) I'm thinking of signing up to keep my iPAQ sync'd with my main 'pooter.

Let me know how you get on.

Chris

[pdV6]

Not sure I fully understand the requirement for the 1st bit... if she's going to have to open a doc, highlight a portion, do something to it and then go back to another doc to refer to the first, wouldn't it be as easy to copy the selected text and just paste it into the 2nd doc?

Going to be difficult to automate this kind of thing anyway, as I suspect the CVs aren't going to arrive in a standard template, hence needing to rewrite them in the 1st place?

[Plotloss]

Indeed thinking more about it, it does seem like a tall order. I was going along the lines of if I can name a block and use it as a source there is perhaps merit going down the path of trying to create text blocks programatically from headings like 'job history' 'job experience' etc by looking for blank lines following paragraphs and then dragging them into a template.

[pdV6]

I think the only sensible way to get this kind of thing to work would be to give candidates a pre-set template with bookmarks etc in it and get them to fill in the text ready for automatic retrieval later. But if you're going down this route, they may as well write their CV in the correct format to begin with, which they won't hence having the conversation in the first place!

[CanAm-TT]

You could search for common phrases.

Getting their name will be easy
DOB and address should be pretty much the same
Then there are telephone numbers they are very consistent and have a fixed number of digits, although this can vary but give it a go!

Dont be defeated this would be a good challenge.

Opening up the doc though is the easy bit

If you want to chat to me, i would be happy to go through code ideas with you