RTF or HTML in Access table (97/2k)

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I wondered if anyone had experience or suggestions for storing formatted data in an Access table. The specific requirement is for storage of short stories, including italics, bold etc. Any pointers would be most appreciated.

Cheers

Jim

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You can’t do it with native Access, although there are some third party custom controls that might work. You can store Word documents in an Access table but it isn’t recommended because the size can get out of hand quickly. The usual alternative is to store links to documents or OLE objects.

What is the purpose in trying to store the documents in Access?

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I’m using the content to build a static, occasionally updated website. I guess links might do the trick…

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You can store tagged text (e.g., with and tags) in the database. The trick then is to get ASP or whatever serving technology you are using to interpret it properly. When I try this with FrontPage’s database webbots, they HTMLencode it so that it appears with the tags in the page rather than formatting it. Not helpful, but maybe fixable. YMMV.

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This is an old thread, so I don’t know if I’m wasting my time or not with a response.

FMS has a Rich Text Tool that works well and is sold as a separate product. There is also a rich text control (on which the FMS tool actually acts as a wrapper). Price for the FMS tool is $299, as I recall. The MS rich text tool is either in the Office Developer toolkit or in Visual Studio, as I recall. Functionality is very similar to the features found in WordPad (fonts, colors, hyperlinks, etc.) and includes an optional spell checker.

I haven’t used it with ’97, but have with 2K. If you do use 2K, you must have SR-1 installed (there’s a bug in the MS RichText tool that SR-1 fixes).

With FMS, you can get at both the formatted text and the raw text in code. The raw text looks much better on forms, and the formatted text looks good in reports.

If you’re doing a lot of editing, pay attention to file bloat, which is related to the use of memo fields, not the use of the RT tools.

If you need to protect the content of these stories, you might look into Adobe’s PDF writer, storing the documents in PDF image form that can be emailed, printed, searched, etc. You create these files by “printing” to the PDF writer from Word, which gives you all the editing and formatting features of Word, and you don’t have to worry about file bloat, no matter how many documents you’ve got.

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