A number of other possibilities for working with Word are available. For example,
you can use Word to do a mail merge from, say, a dynamically generated Excel document,
as in the example in Chapter 4. Or, you can create a template .doc file, open it, and
replace keywords with dynamically generated data. For details on the various ways you
can use Microsoft Word, see the MSDN documentation at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/
en-us/library/kw65a0we(VS.80).aspx. You??™ll need to translate the code from the languages
these techniques provide into Ruby, but as demonstrated in Listing 12-1, that??™s reasonably
straightforward.
CHAPTER 12 n CREATING REPORTS WITH RUBY AND MICROSOFT OFFICE 235
Figure 12-1. Importing data into Word with Win32OLE
Working with Microsoft Access
To exportMicrosoft Access files, you can use MDB Tools (http://mdbtools.sourceforge.
net/), an open source project. You can use MDB to convert Access databases (which have
the extension .mdb, hence the name MDB Tools) to a more open database architecture,
such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.
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