All you need now is a means of inserting your graphic elements.Īnother option that may be feasible if your wordprocessor formatting is relatively simplistic (font & type sizes, justification, indentation), is to do the whole thing in FileMaker. You can now, at any point, export from FileMaker (just the calc field), export as text, with filename ending in '.rtf', and the result, when opened in Word, will be your report, already formated and ready to go. In FileMaker, you can then create a calculation field (result=text) consisting of the RTF code except interspersing the actual FileMaker fields by fieldname instead of the merge-codes. Open the result in a plain-text editor such as BBEDit or TextWrangler so you can see the raw RTF code. If you draw up a report skeleton in Word, formatted the way you want it but with various merge-codes for where you want field data from FileMaker, you can save the results as an RTF file (Word>Save As>RTF).

Thanks so much for reading this, and I appreciate your help! Doing this I could create a report template that would be updated whenever the Excel data was updated.īefore I spend the many hours trying setup such a system, I'm hoping to get your suggestions on whether this is sound or if you have other ideas that would work. Can anyone confirm this, and does it mean that there is no way to link Filemaker data to graphs?īased on this, it looked like the only way to do this was to export Filemaker data to Excel, create the graphs in Excel, then copy and paste to Word (pasting as a 'linked' object). I think I can do a mail merge to link Filemaker and Word to update text fields (suggestions for this step are welcome!), but what really takes the most amount of time is updating many many graphs in each report.įrom Filemaker Pro's website, Mac OS doesn't support Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) so it sounds like I can't connect data/fields from Filemaker Pro to graphs in Word.

It really burns me that I essentially have to enter the data twice (once in Filemaker and then again in the individual Word reports), and it seems like there should be an easier solution (and yeah, I need the data in Filemaker for other reasons so I can't skip that step). Here's my problem: I spend much of my working hours creating decent looking reports in MS Word that include a combination of text and bar graphs based on data I have entered in other apps (SPSS and Filemaker Pro). Before I start describing my convoluted hopes and dreams for these apps, let me just say that any and all ideas/suggestions are welcome - I'm feeling pretty stuck

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