I don’t know who’s going to be able to help me with this one, but I’m hoping someone can, the premice is simple enough but it’s not turning out to be easy.
I’m creating a database for traching a specific document, or series of linked documents, I don’t want the database to hold all the data from the document because thats just a waste of time. from access I can open the document, read out the neccessary bits and bobs to create the tracking record and I’m happy. What I now want is to have either a link to the document or a graphic of the document in like a preview window, making the document readable, from within access without opening it fully or without importing all the info to the database. I’ve tried using the document image writer turning the document into mdi’s and tiff’s but I then can only view the first page.
You’ll need to embbed the ActiveX / DCOM control into a form. You could setup a form with tabs or controls that look at the extension, then it would provide the proper control to become active providing a preview. I will tell you that the MDB will become huge when doing this. I would also be worried that the RAM use would be well huge because you are just loading up the active control at startup. So lets say you have EXCEL, WORD, and PDF embedded…well it’s just like starting all those when the ACCESS mdb starts.
I tried this and it was just a pain, and needed lots of waiting for items to load for viewing. My work around was just linking the files into a data table, descriptions of what the file add in it, and double click to launch.
I know what you’re trying to complete would be cool, but lots of overhead makes it not practical.
I’ve cheated, I’ve dropped a web browser activeX control into the form, then I tell the browser to navigate to the document, this means that provided the document can open in a web browser it opens, simple, now just to get rid off the ‘do you want to save’ box that comes up when I open office documents, pdf’s and images open great, would be nice if I could get MDI’s or tiff’s to open in the web browser.